Roland Mainz wrote:
> AFAIK the same arguments were done more than twenty years ago for the
> X11 documentation. Instead of sticking with a standard format the X11
> Consortium picked an application-specific format to do most of the X11
> documentation. Twenty years later these files were simply "blobs of raw
> data" where the applications weren't available anymore (and even if you
> had binaries you needed a license key), the file format documentation
> was incomplete (making it impossible to write a converter) and the
> people who originally wrote the documentation were long retired or
> "gone". At the end all these documents were unuseable, unsalvageable and
> simply "lost" - because twenty years ago someone picked the "hip&&cool
> file format of the month".
Don't be overly dramatic - I don't know of any X11 docs that are lost to
obscure file formats. Sure, there's a couple that require proprietary
apps like FrameMaker, but I've used Sun's site license to provide XML exports
of those to anyone who cares enough to update them. And since all the docs
were also provided in Postscript, they can all at least be read, if not easily
modified.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
