possible documentation viewer?

[Sean Wheller]

On Friday 03 June 2005 17:45, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Standardisation, common display, translation infrastructure, applicability
> of advanced functionality in the future (indexing, context-sensitive and
> topic oriented help), commonality with upstream, etc. DocBook is a standard
> that we can rely on - delivering lowest-common-denominator HTML as a way of
> avoiding the set of things we need to address with DocBook is reactionary
> and compounds the problems we'll have in the future.
>
> I'll be writing more about this in my analysis of breezy goals next week.

Docbook is just a presentation neutral, valid and well-formed format that is 
easily programatically accessible that can be used to store document content. 
It is not presentation. All Yelp is doing is transforming Docbook into HTML 
and displaying it. Shaun's XSL files are compiled into Yelp. It it them that 
does the work, but they don't support all possabilities.

In the docteam we still keep everything in SVN standardized on Docbook. The 
only diff with our approach is that we want to ship static HTML and GNOME Doc 
Group ships only XML that Yelp transforms on the fly. But to the user, it is 
content that counts, not the format.

I like your points above, but I really would not like every disto based on 
GNOME to have the same look and feel in the help system :-) I think what Yelp 
needs is a way for people to create their own custom layer that changes and 
styles the content for the whole distro. So I like the idea of dynamic 
transformation under yelp, but I don't like the lack of customization. With 
unsupported issues I understand the limitations will in-time be overcome, but 
that is not what we have today.


-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
084-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
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