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From: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
To: Joshua D. Drake <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: David Fetter <[email protected]>
Cc: Guillaume Lelarge <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Authoring Tools WAS: Switching to XML
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:27:37 -0800
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

Josh,

> Anything that you produce from a WYSWYG editor is going to have to be
> massaged to work with PostgreSQL.Org docs.

*sigh* too bad Lyx only writes DocBook and doesn't read it.  

> > * = an authoring tool is one which makes generation of the document
> > easier/faster than hand-editing text files.  No such tool exists for
> > SGML -- even the Emacs toolkit merely does validation.
>
> What is it specifically you are looking for then? Because that is what
> Docbook is, XML (or sgml) the only thing you need to do is validate.

"Authoring Tool" means "not always hand-editing tags".  Right now, I can't 
do anything with Emacs SGML that I couldn't do with Wordpad or Pico, 
except validate.

Let me give you an example of a doc change which needing to hand-edit SGML 
prevented me from making:  I wanted to clean up runtime.sgml by adding an 
alpha index, and clearly breaking out data like defaults, set time, etc.   
This meant changing 70% of the document, including some significant 
re-arranging.

After 5 hours of editing, I discovered that I was only 1/3 done ... and 
that there had been incompatible changes in CVS in the meantime.  I gave 
up.

If the docs were WYSWYG-editable or if we had any authoring tool which 
would automatically fix tags, I would have been able to make the changes 
and submit a patch in < 4 hours, not 15 hours+ it would have taken to 
complete the project.   

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco

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