Re: Authorship

[David Lawyer <dave@lafn.org>]

> > On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 2.38PM David Lawyer wrote:
> > > 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).  
> 
On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 12:28:11AM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> 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.

Sorry but I was right the first time (Jun 07).  The template.sgml by
Stein Gjoen is actually nothing but LinuxDoc and I thought it was
DocBook (in part because it uses a few features of LinuxDoc that I
didn't know about).
> 
> > >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:
[ Discussion of problems with the plain-text output of LinuxDoc and
[ possible fixes

On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 12:28:11AM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> Good.  All of the above makes DocBook look better.  

Yes, solving the problems with plain-text output makes DocBook look
better but...  Due to my misunderstanding re the number of tags
required, I'm retracting all of the following paragraph:

> 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).
> 

Actually, the use of minimal tags for DocBook might be a good idea if
it could be made a "standard" and if it's not hard to implement.  But
this is a long-term project (and rather low-priority for the LDP).  So
I'm retracting it with a but ...  My apologies to both Gregory Leblanc
and Gary Preckshot for having to disagree with me on something which I
wrote by mistake.

What I propose is to have a "Quick-start with LinuxDoc" section of the
HOWTO-HOWTO that will present the option of just using LinuxDoc
starting from either template.sgml (or example.sgml which I think is
better).  It will not explain (or even mention) any concepts of sgml
such as Jade, DSSSL, DTDs, etc.  There should be a pointer to it in
the introduction of HOWTO-HOWTO so that people who do not want to use
DocBook can jump directly to it.  They will be able to do LinuxDoc
manually using whatever editor/word-processor they already know how to
use.

			David Lawyer


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to ldp-discuss-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org