> ... I agree with your assessment of *roff and TeX (I used both > extensively). However, I did write a 10 page technical > document (34 with the appendices that simply include the > files) in DocBook-XML. I have turned away in disgust and > never looked back.
I'll use Zvezdan's example here as a jumping-in point, because it serves to highlight my primary concern here. But before I start, I think I speak for us all when I say to ESR: welcome to the groff list, and thanks for the contributions you've made to the "cause" (and that includes doclifter). But from here on, I speak for myself unless someone wants to delegate. :-) I've been doing technical writing in the commercial realm for about 23 years now; I started with *roff, moved to Word and then FrameMaker, took a long hard look at XML, and recently "returned to my roots" because I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the capabilities of even FrameMaker (easily the best of the current commercial GUI tools). My experiments and stabs at working with XML in general leave me fearing it's a rabbit hole that many technical writers won't dare go down, and the ones that do will eventually look for a way out. The problem with using XML for documentation is that it was designed specifically for machine processing -- and *people* write documents for *other* people. The human element has been tripping up XML doctypes, one after another, for quite a while now. One can mandate DocBook here, or DITA there, but if you have to *mandate* you've already failed. Success means an *embrace* -- and HTML is about the only doctype that has ever been widely embraced rather than endured. Five years or so ago, back before I moved from Linux to MacOSX, the Konqueror browser did an impressive job displaying man pages. I could type a URI like "man:ls" into the address bar and Konq would display the manpage -- and even recognize the foo(1) idiom and format it as a link. I don't imagine that the KDE developers have stood still since then; what might it be capable of now? And, more to the point, why bother converting this entire body of documentation to DocBook if there's already a good way to convert it to cross-linked HTML? Wasn't that the whole point of this exercise anyway? Another possibility is that groff itself can do the conversion. The HTML "driver" has a ways to go yet before being able to produce beautiful HTML, but what comes out now is close enough to clean up using some awk scripts and HTML Tidy. So it might be easier, short- and long-term, to encourage people to add the -mwww macros to their man pages. -- Larry _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
