Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:05:37 -0500 From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@telenix.org> To: Murray Stokely <murray@stokely.org> Cc: Frank Shute <frank@shute.org.uk>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: text formatting tools. Message-ID: <497CE231.5000202@telenix.org> In-Reply-To: <2a7894eb0901241449y49391f6aj6414875e8781ea4@mail.gmail.com> References: <497B77C7.90001@telenix.org> <2a7894eb0901241353l56be13b4s9860b9e949bc9ec2@mail.gmail.com> <20090124224237.GA96097@melon.esperance-linux.co.uk> <2a7894eb0901241449y49391f6aj6414875e8781ea4@mail.gmail.com>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Murray Stokely wrote: > Yea, that is a good point. The one last thing I meant to add was that > in general I think we have plenty of people in the doc project that > can work to render the documentation and work on the stylesheets and > presentation and such. What we really need is simply more authors. > > Text can be submitted in plain text with no markup at all in groff, > xml, or anything else through the mailing lists or PR database. There > are plenty of volunteers that can mark up the text and get it > committed. > > - Murray > > On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Frank Shute <frank@shute.org.uk> wrote: >> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 01:53:38PM -0800, Murray Stokely wrote: >>> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Chuck Robey <chuckr@telenix.org> wrote: >> <big snip> >> >> Another advantage of XML is greater familiarity with the toolset >> amongst the target authorship. >> >> I dare say a number of people have tackled the similar HTML/XHTML/CSS >> for authoring on the www, whereas few have tackled a manpage or >> suchlike. >> >> With regards a huge toolset, for the FreeBSD docs you don't need TeX >> to produce the HTML version. The HTML can also always be converted to >> postscript using, for example, Firefox for hardcopy. >> >> Apologies for the big snip but I didn't particularly want to reply to >> any one point & wanted to avoid redundancy. Well, firstly, if no one else complains, then I don't mind whatever snipping you do. However, that's not the only comment I wanted to make: You said that most written things are hierarchical. Sorry, I strongly disagree, except for the tech manuals and web pages. Please, reach over your bedpost, grab ANY of the fiction books you are likely to read (any sci-fi?) and then show me where that is done hierchically. Some authors bother to give numbers to their chapters, but seeing as they don't even bother to give a table of contents, you can see in clear terms just how *non-hierarchical* they are. These books lose nothing whatever if you even remove all references to chapter breaks entirely. Take also a look at most of the letters you've ever written (with the exception which I noted, of commercial things), and show me where they need a database. If you look at fiction or nearly all articles of any type, they don't use or need any database approach. Now take a look at your college textbooks, and note that (outside of indexes which are easily handled by far simpler tools) very few of them have any need of hierarchical database approaches. At least my Physics textbooks, which I'm looking at now, seem that way. Tech manuals which are full of references to values that change, yes, they are exceptions, as are all commercial things, but not the mass of written materials. OK, look at the size thing: The size is far more than a figure of 10 to 1, as anyone who's tried to fix a bug in those huge things, makes a difference. I just don't like something that is huge for the simple reasons of being follow the leader: nearly nothing I have ever written would benefit from being formatted in xml. The Handbook, it's a tech manual (you'll agree?) and it would be, but not most things. Lastly, you reacted poorly to my peripheral reference to MS (to the Word tool). You'd like to be able to say that I made some anti-MS comment, but read it again, while my personal feelings ARE that way, I did no such thing. I was only making the argument thatfolks who trumpet "compatibilty" with tools should be given more than a slightly suspicious glance, and that's a very strong reason (beyond the database features) that most give for using xml. You comment that most folks know the xml tools better. If that was any kind of meaningful argument, then xml would never ever have even been considered at all, right? Xml isn't an author-friendly protocol. Like Cobol before it, it's quite wordy, and so gigantic, it's difficult to use. Most authors (outside of tech manuals and web pages) don't bother to carefully, hierarchically lay out their writeups. They hafve probably an outline, but that's the more common limit. Can't do that with xml, can you? Try it without using some wysiwig editor to help. That's not true of groff, none of it. Yes, this is a very unpopular argument, but I still think it's got more than a little truth behind it, if you look past web pages and tech manuals. Many people see this as a trend of the future, but it's certainly not a big help in writing most items. What it does is force one to use wysiwyg tools, something I've always disliked. I think that that bias isn't an unpopular one among FreeBSDers, either. >> >> Regards, >> >> -- >> >> Frank >> >> >> Contact info: http://www.shute.org.uk/misc/contact.html >> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkl84jEACgkQz62J6PPcoOnEdACeNwruYO+hVOlFfCHNsymZNeyL kwwAoJu2FWP3Emdn0ESkByXPXNnnIkdL =v9KW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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