Re: docbook IDE

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, Joakim Ziegler wrote:

> To clear up any confusion about this, no, Conglomerate isn't dead, but it is
> indeed sleeping. Both Hans Petter and I work at Helix Code now, and time has
> been very sparse lately.
> 
> However, we recently discussed what to do with the project, and agreed that
> we will try to put together something that lets you edit XML files on disk
> with arbitrary DTDs, and a few other features, thus making it pretty useful
> for, say, people who use Emacs for DocBook now, and then do the extra fancy
> features later. So we're definitely planning on starting work on it again, it
> looks like work is going to start happening within a month or two.

This is really great news.  Having easy to use tools will help all the
open documentation projects a lot.  

You might be interested to hear: The Open Documentation Summit was today
and one of the topics we discussed was documentation tools.  A number of
people expressed the opinion that we needed a GUI XML authoring
tool.  Only a couple of us had heard of Conglomerate, so Eric Bischoff
(KDE doc team) quickly brought up Conglomerate on his laptop and showed it
to everybody.  It was met with a lot of praise by everybody there. One
person even offered to have a couple hackers in his group help out.  I
think I can confidently say that if Conglomerate gets to a usable state, a
lot of people will be very happy.

I hope to be able to put together a real summary of the meeting
soon.  (Unless the O'Reilly folks beat me too it;)

Dan