> Why Not?
> 
> There ARE some disadvantages to this whole plan. First, nobody here 
> really knows Docbook (including myself), so this is a sort of educated 
> guess on my part. I'm sure this is better than the current method, it 

You don't really know it, but you are sure it's superior? Don't you mean 
"other people have told me it's superior", or "I read somewhere it was 
superior"?

> just might wind up being superseded in the future. Second, a lot of the 
> new people volunteering aren't programmers and may be intimidated by 
> Docbook. I believe that this isn't a problem, as it tends to be easier 
> to mark up content than it does to write the documentation and I think 
> that we could get volunteers to mark it up that are too busy now to do 
> the full writing process.

Bugzilla uses DocBook for our documentation, and we find it a pain in 
the arse a lot of the time. Setting up the tools on Unix is non-trivial, 
even for a modern distro. I've never seen working tools on Windows at 
all. The HTML output from the standard transform looks ugly. Like all 
XML, it's really picky about what tags you can nest in what.

Only use DocBook out of the box if you are either a) happy to spend the 
rest of your life translating other people's documents into DocBook 
again and again, or b) want to vastly raise the barrier to contributing 
documentation. I think you assertion that getting things marked up isn't 
a problem is extremely optimistic.

Gerv


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