on Sun Jun 24 2007, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld-AT-sympatico.ca> wrote:
David Abrahams wrote:
on Sat Jun 23 2007, "Gennadiy Rozental" <gennadiy.rozental-AT-thomson.com> wrote:
There several WYSWYG editors producing DocBook (and I don't need to enter markup at all!) and this trend is going to grow.
Yeah, but we need to represent semantic information (e.g. Concepts) that are outside the builtin representational abilities of DocBook.
DocBook is designed for extensibility.
I know. That's why I said *builtin*. BoostBook is just an extension of DocBook, using expressly-designed hooks in DocBook for that purpose. I don't consider that an NIH move on our part; quite the contrary.
How well will these WYSIWYG editors handle BoostBook's special tags?
I'm not aware of fany DocBook editors, only XML editors. And these don't notice 'special tags'. You feed them a document type (DTD, RelaxNG, XSchema, etc.), and they Just Work.
Yeah, well Gennadiy cited WYSIWYG.
Which editors are these, BTW?
The one I have run across is xxe (http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/). But I'm mostly using (x)emacs, which has its own xml-editing modes that will happily accept any customization layer, too.
Yeah, that's fine too; I use emacs. It's just not quite WYSIWYG... not that it's a problem for me.
5. This is new *nonstandard* format any new developer will have to learn. I don't believe we can afford yet another barrier for new submitters.
Unless they already know DocBook, DocBook represents a much higher barrier for most people getting started.
There are other standard languages that could be used as a mixin, such as ReST.
Yes. Big fan here. C++ TMP and the MPL reference and Boost.Parameter docs and the new getting started guide were all written in ReST.
The point is not only syntactical ease. But having independent development / maintainence, documentation, etc., is invaluable. That's essentially the first argument above.
Yes, it's huge. Someone else wrote an emacs editing mode for ReST that works great. I had to try to write a qbk-mode. It took a long time. It doesn't work great. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com The Astoria Seminar ==> http://www.astoriaseminar.com