Zack Brown <zbrown@tumblerings.org> writes:
> On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 09:50:51AM -0800, Blair Zajac wrote:
> > This may be relevant for the SVN book authors.
> >
> > "Arnold Robbins explains how he transformed Texinfo into DocBook
> > for Effective Awk (for O'Reilly)."
> >
> > http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/linux/2002/11/01/awk3.html
>
> Is this the direction Subversion is going? Currently I see four
> distinct documentation formats in the project: plain text, emacs
> outline, texinfo, and docbook. That does seem like a lot. It might
> be best to standardize on two of them. Say, docbook format for
> formatted docs, and emacs outline for everything else.
I definitely would like to see the texinfo disappear in favor of
docbook for formatted documents.
As for plain text and emacs outline -- I don't see the point in
drawing a distinction between these two. I mean, while all the
formats you listed above are textual formats, I don't think I'm out of
line to suggest that the formats can be divided into:
1. those that have no special 'markup info' ("plain text").
2. those whose 'markup info' is an annoyance when treated as plain
text ("docbook" and "texinfo").
3. those whose 'markup info' is non-obtrusive, perhaps even useful,
when treated as plain text ("outline mode").
To me, categories 1 and 3 are effectively the same. Using an ignorant
text-file viewer, the user's reading experience is not encumbered by
out-of-band markup data. So, I'd say, stick with docbook for anything
in category 2, and let everything in categories 1 and 3 use whatever
format best suits the task.
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Received on Sun Nov 3 23:32:27 2002