discuss: wiki and cvs
Subject:
Re: [discuss] wiki and cvs
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
19 Jan 2007 09:13:09 -0000
Message-Id: <20070119091300.GB5366@davespc>
On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 11:44:35AM +0530, Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:
> On 07/01/18 11:41 -0800, David Lawyer said ...
> > > I was wondering if anybody on the list has used DocBookWiki
> > > <http://doc-book.sourceforge.net/homepage/>? The feature list does look
> >
> > I think that the best wiki markup would be a small subset of linuxdoc.
> > But no one has created such a wiki. Docbook markup, in my opinion is
> > far to complex and verbose for a wiki.
>
> Not if the "backend" is Docbook markup, which is what DocBookWiki claims
> to support.
>
> > > * Editing can be done in several modes, like text, html, xml, texi,
> > > * latex etc.
>
> > Can the vim editor be used?
>
> One can always copy from the Vim editor to the web text boxes.
What if you're using a text browser?
>
> > > * The basic format is always DocBook (XML), no matter how it is
> > > * displayed or edited.
> >
> > This is bad news IMO. XML doesn't permit the omission of tags.
> > Tag omission is utilized by linuxdoc (SGML) to reduce the tag count by
> > about 80% and makes it much easier to read by omitting nested tags.
>
> This isn't bad news. For someone that uses DocBookWiki on the web,
> DocBook/XML isn't visible at all. The original backend DocBook/XML can
> be edited as text, html, texi, latex etc. is what the above says.
If you're editing a DocBook doc, you have to deal with the docbook
tags in one way or another. For example, suppose I choose to edit it
as text. Suppose I want to add an itemized list, a url with a name I
choose, and a 2nd level section. This can't be done with just plain
text and no tags. Wikis do it by the used of underlining, **, etc and
these are actually tags. Wikis are not plain text.
With regular html, there are no html tags that correspond to certain
docbook tags. Using docbook with all it's tags for a wiki can get
very complex. If someone uses a large number of different docbook
tags in a wiki and then someone else who doesn't know docbook wants to
modify these tags, how can it be done? It really can't, since there is
no one-to-one mapping from the other formats to docbook. And if that
someone doesn't know any docbook tags, they will not understand what
is creating various aspects of the presentation.
The translation from docbook to html will lose a lot of docbook tags.
Because if someone edits it in html and the result get translated back to
docbook, docbook tags will be missing that were originally there.
This is wrong because the person that used a lot of docbook tags, may
have hoped (likely in vain -:) that all these tags would someday be of
significant help to a future semantic analysis of the doc. And now
many of these tags get destroyed without anyone actually deleting the
tags.
> I think you are under the impression that one would have to edit
> DocBook/XML on the web.
No I wasn't but I assume that one can optionally edit docbook on the
web.
David Lawyer
