Re: PROPOSAL: Help File Format Standardization

[Michael Poole <poole graviton res cmu edu>]

Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com> writes:

>  The UISG proposes that..
> 
>  o All GNOME Application Help Text is to be written in HTML.
> 
>  o Why HTML? Simple. Plenty of authoring tools, its an accepted
>    standard, its portable, extensible, flexible, and clean. It
>    will also make the transition path for KDE developers a little
>    easier, once they've realize the error of their ways and start
>    developing for GNOME. ;)
> 
> Yes, I know about docbook.
> 
> Agree or Disagree?

    Strongly disagree.  The rest of the GNOME project already has
standardized on DocBook as the preferred documentation format.  It is
trivially transformable to HTML, text, texinfo, and other formats, and
(importantly) its markup elements are much more documentation-oriented
than HTML -- which makes maintaining the documentation or performing
format alterations MUCH easier in DocBook than in HTML.  Encoding help
documents in HTML is a lossy process since the markup is not "about"
documentation.

    Also, HTML is standard and mostly portable, but it is NOT extensible,
it is not flexible without style sheets, and it stopped being clean after
about HTML 2.0.

-- Micahel