Subject: Re: House style for DocBook documentation?
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
References: <201901191335.kbjzsoefmkoa@alvherre.pgsql>
Cc: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>,
 Markus Winand <markus.winand@winand.at>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
 PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
From: Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net>
Message-ID: <5C438776.9080103@anastigmatix.net>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 15:24:22 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/38.7.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <201901191335.kbjzsoefmkoa@alvherre.pgsql>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Precedence: bulk

Hi,

On 01/19/19 08:35, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Is there, somewhere, a written-up "house style" for what DocBook 4.2
>> elements to use for which types of content in the manual?
>> ...
> I don't think we do.  I'd suggest to come up with something and then see
> if it makes sense to patch the docs to apply it regularly.

I think my ambition at the moment is just to complete a particular
addition to func.sgml and do so as consistently as I can manage with
what's there now.

I have noticed a couple of things:

- 'SQL' is often marked up as <acronym>SQL</acronym>, but far from always.

- no such markup is applied to 'JSON' or 'XML' at all, at least
  not in func.sgml.

- there is a README.links with this guideline:

  o  Do not use text with <ulink> so the URL appears in printed output

  but a grep -r in doc/src/sgml turns up 112 uses that observe the
  guideline, and 147 that supply link text.

(thinks to self half-seriously about an XSL transform for generating
printed output that could preserve link-texted links, add raised numbers,
and produce a numbered URLs section at the back)

-Chap