[Advacs-discuss] Standards

[David Palmer]

Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote:

> Oliver Elphick wrote:
>
>> Let me stress that, so far, all theses "standards" are up for
>> discussion.  I've just put my own ideas up.  Once we agree them, though,
>> we will need to be consistent, so we need to get them right now, if we
>> can.
>>
>> On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 11:08, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote:
>>
>>> Documentation
>>> -------------
>>>
>>> | Where possible, documentation should be written in SGML for the
>>> | Docbook dtd.
>>>
>>> Should we choose docbook-xml? In writing man pages I experienced 
>>> problems like defining a character encoding explicitely. I googled 
>>> around nearly one day to solve this problem. The only thing I 
>>> learned was, that docbook-xml should be preferred.
>>>
>>> I have only experience in using docbook-sgml. But if docbook-xml is 
>>> well supported by debian-packaging utilities, we should use xml.
>>
>
>> I have no experience of it either.  I will go along with this if people
>> agree that it is a good thing.  What we will also need to know is what
>> tools to use to write for it; I like to use xemacs, but there are bugs
>> in the psgml code in that.  Is there a different module for xml?  Does
>> anybody know?
>
>
> I use a battery of editors, each has its (dis)advantages. OpenOffice 
> has support for docbook-sgml, but this is very poor (and unusable). 
> For docs I use kate or kwrite, as they have syntax highligthing, 
> support for different character encodings (and conversion), and spell 
> check.
>
> We will have to find it out.

Docbook-xml is an accepted standard within Debian and to be preferred 
over sgml.
It's a lighter form of the same thing.
Sgml quite frankly is overkill for most applications.
I could probably get on top of it.
I've procrastinated for long enough about getting involved, and as I 
can't code as yet, that will leave you guys free to do that with just a 
translation of an already prepared format to do afterward.
We could probably get help with language modules as we go.
Regards,

David.