discuss: LinuxDoc vs. DocBook, was Re: part of the review?
Subject:
Re: LinuxDoc vs. DocBook, was Re: part of the review?
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
18 Jul 2001 06:24:29 -0000
Message-Id: <20010717231359.A386@lafn.org>
On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 10:11:57PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> Some things are facts: Here is a comparison of LinuxDoc vs DocBook:
Now that we've hopefully establish that LinuxDoc is easier and faster
to type in and cleaner to read, let's discuss the other issues.
I'm not saying that LinuxDoc is better in every way. It isn't, but
it's useful for authors that want to get started very quickly.
LinuxDoc is both a lot faster to learn and faster to use.
A major point is that LinuxDoc can be converted by machine to DocBook.
Thus if KDE and Gnome need documents in DocBook then they can use the
converted files. There are a few different tools that may be used for
such a conversion and I suppose that I'll need to look into them. I
think it's feasible to get at least one of these tools working right.
Every LinuxDoc submission to LDP gets automatically converted to
LinuxDoc, but they don't look pretty. Isn't there a beautifier for
them?
So my argument is that by machine converting all LinuxDoc submissions
to DocBook, then all the arguments that DocBook is needed become moot
points since LinuxDoc generates DocBook. If certain tags become
essential that are not in LinuxDoc, then add them to LinuxDoc.
Now I would like to mention how it's easy to learn several tags. But
if you double the number of tags it may be more than twice as
difficult. That's because the most important tags are obvious to
people. As one adds more tags they become less obvious. One hardly
needs to explain what <title>, <author>, and <date> tags mean. Every
doc needs to have a title, author, and date.
Also I think that LinuxDoc needs to be promoted to the public at large
as a simple way to write all kinds of short works using free software.
It could be used by small business and organizations.
It was proposed that to simplify things one could use a small subset
of the DocBook tags. This is still too difficult due to:
1. The need for end tags
2. The need for paragraph tags (LinuxDoc doesn't need them)
3. The need for nested tags (resulting in more tags).
4. The longer length of the tags
If an author has to spend hours learning DocBook and still more extra
time writing with it, that's wrong in many cases. If you are
just writing several pages (or even just a page or two) it just isn't
a productive use of time to learn DocBook. The result of pushing
DocBook is fewer new volunteer LDP authors.
David Lawyer
