Re: Mallard Article for Gnome Journal

[Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org>]

On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 09:57 +0100, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> Hey Shaun,
> 
> 2010/2/10 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> >
> > I'd like to get some community feedback on what topics
> > people think should be addressed in the article.
> 
> Why not a tutorial or some kind of article, describing how
> third-parties, ISVs, downstreams, can plug their own modifications to
> the help of a program?
> I don't know if this kind of article would suit GJ, but it could be
> really interesting to showcase how it is easy to provide updated
> documentation based on personal modifications or patches to a program.
> Interesting could also be to provide a supposed workflow on how to
> deal with writing a new topic/page, how to test it and validate it,
> and how to deal with translations. A plus: how to provide a separate
> package to update only the help.
> 
> I don't know... just throwing there ideas...
> 
> Ciao.
> 

I think there may be an opportunity for 2 different articles.  When I
first pinged Shaun about a possible article, my thought was more of an
overview of Mallard, including:

* How did it start?  What drove Shaun to create a new language from
scratch?
* Why?
* What are the benefits? (Maybe users vs. developers?)
* Where are we with Mallard?
* Where are we going?  What can users expect in the future around GNOME
Help?

My thought would be to do more of an introduction type article, and then
(assuming someone like Shaun) could follow it up up in the next edition
of GJ with a tutorial type article.  (And I'm hopeful either article has
a blurb about why in-application topic based help is so important).  One
side benefit of having more than one article is keeping Mallard in the
news more too.

These are just my thoughts, I'm obviously not the one writing the
article!  :)  Or one article could combine aspects of both of these
ideas.

Thanks again for volunteering to write an article, and I think it's
really cool you reached out to the community for feedback.

Paul