Re: (Was The GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation)

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim styx net>]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 10:44:31AM -0500, David Mason wrote:

> But that has been my whole point to anyone who will listen -
> <important part>Graphical SGML Editors of this Nature(Conglomerate)
> make it too easy to minimize your markup!!!!!</important part>. It
> happen with every app that has taken this approach - it is way to easy
> to miss something like <guilabel> when all you have to do is write -
> not tag and write!

> I know people keep saying Conglomerate is the end all to our
> documentation woes - but it is not! From my tests of it - it does
> things a bit oddly (a stylesheet for a DTD to use *in* the editor
> only???) and it can make for badly marked up docs - have you seen the
> raw output?

As duly noted in the release notes for that test code: If you're using
Conglomerate to do any real work at this point, you are totally insane. The
released Conglomerate code is a proof of concept, mostly for the GUI. Don't
judge Conglomerate based on the current state of the output, that *will* be
fixed.

As for the stylesheet to be used only in the editor, yes, this is completely
unavoidable if the we don't want a WYSIWYG XML editor, and although some
people seem to think that this is a good idea (applying a presentation style
sheet while you edit) we really want to avoid it, and show you the structure
of what you're working on instead. The good news is that a) Conglomerate will
ship with displayspecs for, amongst other things, DocBook, so you practically
won't even notice that you require one, and b) there will be a dialog to
easily change displayspecs while getting immediate feedback, so it's easy to
set up your editing environment the way you like it.

I might also add that if you have important feedback like this on problems
with Conglomerate, it'd be really nice if the development team got to hear
about it, instead of picking it up on a relatively unrelated mailing list. We
are working very hard to try to create a high-quality document system, and
this is certainly the type of concerns we'd appreciate to hear, it lets us do
our job better.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - styx research director - joakim@styx.net
FIX sysop - FIXmud admin - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer