Re: reduce redundancy?

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Kevin Breit wrote:

> Hey guys,
> 	I was curious if we'd be willing to save ourselves time!  Oh yeah we
> all do.  So now how to do that.  I figure we could put a template for some
> commonly used sections or what not.  For example, 90% of Gnome apps have a
> File/New
> File/Open
> File/Save
> File/Save As
> File/Quit
> Why don't we create a publically available text file, not even SGML, that we can
> use for other docs.  The other advantage to this, is that we'll know that all
> the docs have the same definition for Open or what not.  I just figure that
> it may take me 10 or 20 minutes to do a File menu, when it can, and should be
> spent doing other stuff.  I figure a simple template with all this stuff in
> it can save us all...just a little bit of time and redundancy

Do we all agree that we need to document all of the menus, even the
somewhat obvious ones like the ones Kevin lists above?  I get the idea
most people agree on this, but I just want to be sure.  (Speak now or
forever...)

If so, I think Kevin's proposal would be helpful.  It would also keep a
degree of uniformity to our documents instead of having 50 different
descriptions of each item.  I would suggest creating a new SGML file
(perhaps gnome-docu/gdp/GDP_standard_items.sgml) which we store all of the
standard items in.  This way people can cut and paste the relevant items
into their document.  (We could consider putting them in the templates,
but only if there aren't too many.  I think we may find that putting them
all in the templates makes the templates rather big.)

Another option would be to use entities.  This would only work if we all
agree on the exact markup we use.  I think right now we have two or three
thoughts on how we should mark up menus. This reminds me... At one time we
decided to make a list of things which were not standardized in the GDP
(such as how we mark up a menu) but should be, and then decide how we
should all mark them up.  Is anybody interested in doing this?  Does
anybody recall what the other things (aside from menu markup) we need to
standardize?  

Sasha's idea of linking to other docs which explain certain concepts is a
good one.  I think it would work well for his example (tearing off menus),
but for Kevin's particular concern (particular menu items which are
commonly used), I think the entity or reference doc would be better
suited.

Dan