Re: Authorship

[David Lawyer <dave@lafn.org>]

> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 2.38PM David Lawyer wrote:
[snip]
> > I noticed that LinuxDoc had each paragraph enclosed with start-end
> > tags which would make it much more difficult to do manually.  With
> > LinuxDoc you only use a paragraph tag at the start of a section
> > (or subsection).  

I was wrong about this.  I looked at a HOWTO which LDP had converted
from LinuxDoc to DocBook.  It had many more tags than the minimum
required (but I didn't realize this).  Looking at the template by
Stein Gjoen shows that paragraphs may be tagged in DocBook similar 
to LinuxDoc.

> >There seems to be a lot more tags (and nested ones) in LinuxDoc.

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 08:58:05PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure if you've got all the DTD's named correctly here.  I find that
> the stricter rules for DocBook with regards to "tag minimization" are much
> better.  I'll post one of my old "vents" about tag minimization (that is,
> omitting end tags) just after this email.

You don't really need to since the template shows that DocBook also
has a lot of tag minimization and is not much more complex than
LinuxDoc (unless you want it to be).

> > Another difficulty with LinuxDoc is that the conversion to plain text
	I meant:	    DocBook		
> > doesn't use section numbering like 2.13.  This makes the text doc
> > difficult to navigate. 
> 
> Do you mean DocBook?  I suspect that we can fix these issues without too
> much trouble.  I think I even have a message from David Mason (Redhat Labs
> and GNOME doc guy) telling how to fix that.  Maybe it was some other
> "emulate LinuxDoc output" thing...
> 
Great.
> > For example, from the table of contents it is
> > more difficult to go to a certain sub-section.  Also the section
> > headers and subsection headers within the document look the same so
> > it's more difficult to navigate.  This is another reason in favor of
> > LinuxDoc.  But since DocBook has more features, it's better in other
> > ways.  Thus I'm suggesting keeping LinuxDoc for quite a while or until
> > DocBook (or a subset thereof) is made almost as simple as LinuxDoc.
> 
> Hmm, that shouldn't be hard to fix either.  It should be just recursion in
> the stylesheets that we're using to process documents.  I don't really want
> to learn DSSSL, but I suppose that I could if nobody else volunteers for
> that.  I've got a BUSY summer at work, so this could become something of a
> constraint on time.

Good.  All of the above makes DocBook look better.  So I'm changing my
opinion on this to favoring suggesting (but not requiring) people to
switch to DocBook after the above problems are fixed provided:  For
the case of existing HOWTOs we need to find a way to convert them to
DocBook with minimal tags so that they look almost like LinuxDoc.
Then the authors would be more willing to accept DocBook (provided
they can easily get and compile the software).

> I think this "machine isn't capable" idea is a silly excuse (no offense
> intended).  Debian has good DocBook packages, 

You may be right.  Right now I'm out of disk space due to a 7MB
HOWTO-HOWTO directory sent me by Gary P.  But when I find space I'll
see if this old 486 works OK with DocBook.

			David Lawyer


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