Andries,
Regarding semantics, information "lost" when converting *our* docbook to
wiki could be saved by embedding trivial wiki "comments". As a
practical matter, almost everything found in our docbook files have
corresponding equivalents in Confluence and can be translated back and
forth between docbook and wiki. Regarding the comment from Atlassian,
they were referring to the complexity of trying to convert Confluence
macros to docbook, since Confluence supports user-supplied macros that
are basically Java plugins producing HTML. The handful of macros we do
use in the wiki seem to map nicely to docbook equivalents (e.g.
{code:xml} for <programlisting role="xml">).
We all know wiki markup is not equivalent to docbook, but instead of
worrying out trying to make perfect conversions back and forth, I
suggest we focus on looking at a specific blocks of code (a real ZF .xml
docbook file, and the corresponding wiki file), to avoid getting lost
and overly concerned about abstract, hypothetical situations or problems
that might not be relevant to our data.
If the community wants to have the ease, simplicity, and pleasure of
using our wiki and commenting features, instead of continuing our
current editing of XML docbook files, then I'm sure we can resolve any
concerns regarding converting back and forth between docbook and the
wiki formats. Also, for our current use of the docbook, the aptconvert
and similar tools raise the question of whether or not we really need
docbook at all.
Cheers,
Gavin
Andries Seutens wrote:
Hello all,
I have been doing some research on doing the wiki to docbook
conversion, however I think it is tricky because you would have to
infer a lot of semantics to get Docbook out of wiki markup.
Wiki-markup is decidedly presentational, which means that we can
transform it quite effectively into other presentational markups (PDF,
non-strict HTML), but not so effectively into semantic markup.
There is a comment somewhere else by an Atlassian employee saying that
a docbook export functionality would require each macro to support
docbook. Therefore docbook would never be supported. I think this is a
valid point, although i don't like that either.
I have found one other alternative that might by valuable to us: APT.
http://www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html
We could export our wiki markup (it already looks a lot like APT) and
then use APTConvert to transform it into HTML, XHTML, PDF, PostScript,
(MS Word loadable) RTF, DocBook SGML and DocBook XML....
What are your thoughts on this manner?
Best regards,
Andries Seutens
Belgium
http://andries.systray.be
