wiki round tripping (was: Ideas Please)

[Jeff Schering]

On 5/21/05, Sean Wheller <sean at inwords.co.za> wrote:

> The docbook > moin route or any other route is easy because of docbook. You
> mention a route in the opposite direction. Sorry to say that the other way is
> not so easy. 

I agree 100%. But the problem is not that moin->DocBook is impossible.
Rather, the problem is that DocBook->moin->DocBook is impossible
because of the information loss during the DocBook->moin
transformation. What is possible is DocBook->moin->DocBook(2), where
DocBook(2) is a pale imitation of the original DocBook document.

If software was intelligent enough to read and understand plain text,
it could render certain words and phrases appropriately. However, we
don't have Artificial Intelligence yet, so we have to give the
software hints. That's what DocBook is for. A human can read  the text
and figure out which words refer to file names, and which words refer
to commands, and then mark up those words with <filename></filename>
or <command></command> tags as appropriate. The tags act as hints to
the transformation software, which converts that descriptive markup
into presentation markup such as html, pdf, or moin.

When the transformation is made, the information contained by the
hints is lost, so the difficulty comes when converting presentation
markup back into descriptive markup. For example, suppose both
<filename></filename> and <command></command> tags are converted to a
fixed width font. In moin, the markup for that is a set of opening {{{
and closing }}}. When transformation software encounters a {{{, it
cannot know if it should convert it to <filename></filename> tags or
<command></command> tags.

One method to get around this limitation is to create a set of
descriptive tags which have a one-to-one relationship with
presentation tags (or at least a unique combination of presentation
tags). This is the idea behind the a2m tool I created. The a2m tagset
is intentionally limited so that round-tripping is less difficult. And
since I designed a2m to also be valid DocBook, we have the additional
benefits of 1) the usual set of DocBook processing tools being
applicable to a2m docs, and 2) the greater ease of copying and pasting
between a2m and DocBook without breaking anything. However, since a2m
is only a subset of DocBook, the copying and pasting will frequently
need tweaking.

The overall utility of wiki round-tripping is a different question... :-)

Cheers,
Jeff 

-- 
GPG Key: 1024D/F23C67E8 2005-02-20 Jeff Schering <jeffschering at gmail.com>