Re: Markup wars (was Re: Proposal for groups)

[Alan Burlison]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> I've fiddled with this before and can do text to HTML; the rest is just a
> question of picking different backends and shouldn't be *too* hard.  All
> the heuristics for parsing text are inherently fragile, but if you follow
> a standard text formatting style, it works reasonably well.

Which is precisely the reason for suggesting XML - it doesn't rely on
'fragile heuristics' to get the parsing right.  POD suffers from the
same problem to some extent, and I really can't see how typing =head1 is
better than typing  - well apart from being one character
shorter, that is.

However, having previously been told to shut up on this subject, I now
will.

Alan Burlison

Re: Markup wars (was Re: Proposal for groups)

[Jarkko Hietaniemi]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2000 at 03:59:32PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Bennett Todd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > My own personal favourite for archival format would be to stick with POD
> > until and unless we can cons up something even Plainer than POD. I've
> > got this dream that someday we'll be able to take something --- perhaps
> > based on Damian's Text::Autoformat --- and use it to parse purely plain
> > ASCII text, formatted nicely for screen display, with no markup at all,
> > and garnish it with markup allowing it to be automatically translated
> > into nice sexy HTML, or SGML according to various other DTDs, or XML, or
> > POD, or the man or mandoc troff macros, or LaTeX, or whatever.
> 
> I've fiddled with this before and can do text to HTML; the rest is just a
> question of picking different backends and shouldn't be *too* hard.  All
> the heuristics for parsing text are inherently fragile, but if you follow
> a standard text formatting style, it works reasonably well.

For more ideas there is the PolyglotMan (nee RosettaMan),
http://polyglotman.sourceforge.net/

> -- 
> Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 

-- 
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen

Re: Markup wars (was Re: Proposal for groups)

[Russ Allbery]

Bennett Todd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> My own personal favourite for archival format would be to stick with POD
> until and unless we can cons up something even Plainer than POD. I've
> got this dream that someday we'll be able to take something --- perhaps
> based on Damian's Text::Autoformat --- and use it to parse purely plain
> ASCII text, formatted nicely for screen display, with no markup at all,
> and garnish it with markup allowing it to be automatically translated
> into nice sexy HTML, or SGML according to various other DTDs, or XML, or
> POD, or the man or mandoc troff macros, or LaTeX, or whatever.

I've fiddled with this before and can do text to HTML; the rest is just a
question of picking different backends and shouldn't be *too* hard.  All
the heuristics for parsing text are inherently fragile, but if you follow
a standard text formatting style, it works reasonably well.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 

Re: Markup wars (was Re: Proposal for groups)

[Nathan Torkington]

Bennett Todd writes:
> Would you accept a restatement of: as long as whatever it is can be
> translated into a common format, we can work with it, and the
> composition of the actual words is far more important than niggling
> over choices in preferred markup style?

Sure, but that begs the question of what is common, and that's yet
another flamewar.

Even if people wanted to write the docs in XML, I'd be happy to have
docs.  We can always PODify them if XML proves troublesome.  It's
having no docs that is the situation we want to avoid.

There are also many documentation needs.  I don't think we need to
distribute the design docs as manpages, but we need to distribute
the user docs as manpages.  When we get to user docs, we'll need to
consider the ultimate destinations for the manpages.  Until that
point, it's all talk with nothing behind it.

Nat

Markup wars (was Re: Proposal for groups)

[Bennett Todd]

2000-12-05-13:02:56 Nathan Torkington:
> I say that the person who *does* the work deserves the right to
> choose what format it is in. So long as we can make navigable
> webpages out of it, that person can write on a Commodore 64 for
> all I care.

Would you accept a restatement of: as long as whatever it is can be
translated into a common format, we can work with it, and the
composition of the actual words is far more important than niggling
over choices in preferred markup style?

My own personal favourite for archival format would be to stick
with POD until and unless we can cons up something even Plainer
than POD. I've got this dream that someday we'll be able to take
something --- perhaps based on Damian's Text::Autoformat --- and
use it to parse purely plain ASCII text, formatted nicely for
screen display, with no markup at all, and garnish it with markup
allowing it to be automatically translated into nice sexy HTML, or
SGML according to various other DTDs, or XML, or POD, or the man
or mandoc troff macros, or LaTeX, or whatever. But it remains a
dream, a fantasy, and I'd say until it's executed, POD rules for a
redistributable format; and if folks want to contribute substantial
piles of useful docs in other formats, we can convert 'em into POD.

-Bennett

 PGP signature