Transition to Mallard?

[Kyle Nitzsche]

All in the spirit of good natured chiming in..
Phil Bull wrote:
{snip}
>  and that
> the tags have long names (I'm sick of typing <menuchoice><guimenuitem>
> every four lines). These confuse newcomers and hinder me.
>
> We don't need the full power of DocBook. We only ever use a very small
> subset of tags. We don't want to spend all day writing long tag names
> and nesting content to five levels. 

One option is gedit's "snippets" plugin. You set up your code snippets 
with shortcuts and gedit inserts what you need, so it cuts down on typing.
For example, if I type ilist + TAB, the following spits out:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

I think the snippets (selected ones) are exportable to a tarball and 
loadable, and are therefore therefore shareable.

There could be a common ubuntu-docs set of snippets, one for each 
'allowed' docbook element chain.

This could both show writers what to use and make it easy to use them.

Gedit > Edit > Preferences > Plugins and select Snippets to enable.
Then: Tools > Manage Snippets and select Docbook in the list on the left 
to see and add snippets.
Then, set the current document to Docbook in the lower right of the 
Gedit window.

Now, you can define and insert docbook code snippets.

Other snippets I use:
media + TAB yields:
<mediaobject>
<imageobject>
<imagedata fileref="" format="PNG"
width="" />
</imageobject>
</mediaobject

inline + TAB yields:
<inlinemediaobject><imageobject><imagedata contentwidth="" fileref=""/>
</imageobject></inlinemediaobject>


Cheers,
Kyle

> We want standalone pages that don't
> need a bunch of esoteric XML commands in order to get them into a useful
> structure. I imagine that we could hammer DocBook into this shape, but
> who is going to do the work? It's not easy stuff. Open source projects
> are susceptible to losing people with specialist skills like the ones
> required to do this.
>
> At the end of the day, I think that heavily modifying DocBook would be
> like fitting a square peg into a round hole. DocBook is very good for
> linear, book-type manuals. It's not very good for topic-based stuff.
>
>   
>>> It's absolutely clear that topic based help is easier for users to
>>> understand when dealing with on-screen help. It's not controversial
>>> and I can't see the Ubuntu doc project or the Gnome project changing
>>> their minds about that.
>>>       
>> Wow. And how do you come to this conclusion? In fact, I will post  
>> later specific documents that in fact prove that you are incorrect.  
>> Truth be told, a taxonomy-based approach has always been proven to  
>> provide better results. The crutch with this approach is the  
>> complexity and vast amount of information presented. Don't believe  
>> me.....go to your nearest university and inquire.
>>     
>
> Please justify this. It contradicts a lot of what I've read about user
> assistance best practises.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Phil
>
>