Ferdinand Soethe wrote:
David Crossley wrote:
DC> I think that it confuses people. Forrest can have multiple DC> source input formats, so this description conflicts with that.
I changed that back an forth a couple of times and finally took 'formats' out. Not just because the repetition sounds bad, but mostly because to me 'input formats' suggests file of different formats (whereas I wanted to broaden the meaning to all input including databases, streams etc.)
DC> I had never heard of the term, so i had to Google. DC> The results did not help to allay my concern.
Yes, this may be an important issue since we also address a lot of programmers looking for documentation. How about spending an extra word on
'Apache Forrest is a standards-based framework for documentation and Single Source Publishing'
Let me try to say it another way: I am very unhappy with this term "Single Source Publishing". Forrest does not restrict people to a single source. I can devise a sitemap that gets various input from many different sources and aggregates it. That is not "single source".
The definition of single source publishing is that you can create many output formats from a single input format (the number on hit on google right now is http://www.lodestar2.com/people/dyork/talks/2002/ols/docbook-tutorial/ this demonstrates outputting many files from a single source document).
However, I see your point, it could be interpreted as meaning that Forrest only supports a single input format. There are not enough words to clarify this in this short description so we need to remove this ambiguity and it was not there in the previous version.
DC> Do we really need to mention a limited list of output formats?
I definitely would because these are the foundation for most publishing tasks. So here extensibility is nice, but the fact that we do HTML and PDF out of the box will be more important for perhaps 90% of the users. Or am I missing something?
The limited nature of the list. Many products can output HTML and PDF. It seems to limit the idea of multiple outputs. Also, tacking the words HTML and PDF onto the end of "unified output" doesn't seem to work. HTML is a mess, not unified.
Anyway, i am not going to fight that one if people want to mention specific outputs. My main gripe is the SSP.
I'm with David on this one. Just as SSP could give the impression of limiting inputs the mention of HTML and PDF could give the impression of limiting outputs.
I'd say stick with what we had (and I'm away from the office for most of the next two days so I'll leave it to you folk to sort out).
Ross
