Re: reduce redundancy?

[Kevin Breit <battery841 mypad com>]

On Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 10:44:12PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 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...)
Personally, I think we should include everything we can.  I personally feel that
if you start pulling stuff out, we're going to shoot ourselves because we'll
lack completness.  Also, I think if we do exclude stuff, then we'll hit a fuzzy
line of "Do we skip this item?"  I think it's better to include everything, and
leave it at that.
> 
> 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.)
Thank you :)  I feel it would be best if we make it in a separate file, as it'll
be easiest to manage.  We should then include a comment in the template to
refer to my file.
> 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?  
I think that using a mixture of entities and template.  For example, I'll define
an entity called app-name and set that to Dia (since I am writing Dia docs).
Then, I'll copy and paste in the template part and it would normally say:
"This will open a new document in application"
But, but defining a few entities up at top, it could say:
"This will open a new document in &app-name;"
I am suggesting this idea to begin with, to save time mostly.  And I feel that
using the entities, described above, will help to make life more easy.
Now, lets figure out which menus to template out.  This is my list:
File
	New
	Open
	Save
	Save As
	Export
	Close
	Exit
Edit
	Cut
	Copy
	Paste
	Undo
	Redo
	Preferences
Help
	Manual
	About
Okay, thats a VERY simple list which I thought of in about a minute.  If you
would like to add stuff to the list, then just add on to the list.
	I'll be willing to do up the template as well.
Kevin
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