On 09/26/2012 11:08 PM, Jessica Tomechak wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Brockmeier [mailto:j...@zonker.net]
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:08 PM
To: CloudStack Developers
Subject: Re: [DOCS] Using DITA vs. Docbook for documentation?
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012, at 01:59 PM, Jessica Tomechak wrote:
Recently someone from the docs world asked me why we are using Docbook
+ Publican for our documentation, rather than DITA. I gave a
reasonable reply, but in the end, I thought it would be worth bringing
the topic up here. For the record, I'm not proposing or advocating
anything. Just looking for the community temperature.
Some benefits listed by this DITA advocate I was speaking with:
Simpler tagging than Docbook
How much simpler? Publican's tagging is pretty simple. It's not
Markdown-simple, but it's not that bad.
It’s open source, has open source community developing useful plugins,
such as latest webhelp output
Publican is also open source, so I don't see any benefit to DITA over
DocBook/Publican in that regard.
Publican has PDF and HTML - it looks like Webhelp is just XHTML with
styling/etc. Is there anything native to webhelp that we don't get from
Publican's HTML output?
We've already put a fair amount of effort into the existing Publican stuff
- so I'd want to see something pretty darn nifty to throw that out in favor
of a new format or have a tool that can easily convert Publican
-> DITA...
Best,
Joe
--
Joe Brockmeier
j...@zonker.net
Twitter: @jzb
http://www.dissociatedpress.net/
Anyone else have an opinion on this?
I don't have a real opinion on which format is really 'the best', but I
do agree that we still have enough work to do with DocBook.
Currently DocBook seems to do everything we need, so I don't see a real
need for switching.
Wido
Joe, thanks for the reply. I pretty much agree with all that you said. On
the question of whether the webhelp format is something we need, or not:
I'm not sure.
Jessica T.
CloudStack Tech Pubs
