discuss: Don't use DocBook, use AsciiDoc, it's for humans
Subject:
Don't use DocBook, use AsciiDoc, it's for humans
From:
"Scot W. Stevenson" ####@####.####
Date:
13 Dec 2005 08:38:47 -0000
Message-Id: <555A3522-1313-480A-A2FC-46AEA2B1AAD8@possum.in-berlin.de>
Hello Yves,
> I'm convinced that we're shooting ourselves in the foot by
> recommending
> DocBook at this time.
My feelings exactly. Unfortunately, the majority here seems to be of
different opinion. Life is bad.
But no! Not all is lost. Normal humans and other people who don't
think they should be forced to type endless series of tags just
because it is a technical text can use Stuart Rackhams's AsciiDoc
(http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html) for their HOWTOs. From
the blurb:
"You write an AsciiDoc document the same way you would write a normal
text document, there are no markup tags or weird format notations.
AsciiDoc files are designed to be viewed, edited and printed directly
or translated to other presentation formats using the asciidoc
command. The asciidoc command translates AsciiDoc files to HTML,
XHTML and DocBook markups."
In other words, you just write the damn thing, and then press a
button to get it to DocBook to make the project people happy. More
importantly, it generates HTML from the same source so you can see
what the format on the web will look like. This is how I did my last
update to the Mock Mainframe HOWTO.
Y, Scot
