Re: Online doc generator (Was: Re: [PEAR-DEV] Amsterdam meeting agenda)

On Apr 12, 2004, at 10:50 AM, David Costa wrote:

On Apr 12, 2004, at 5:43 PM, Paul M Jones wrote:

Please tell me why we shouldn't drop docbook.

Because Docbook is technically the right tool for our needs.

I ask again, "What are our needs?" I don't mean to nag, but has anyone really listed our requirements? Requirements first, technology later. I attempted to list requirements earlier in this thread, and I will list them again here:

I would argue we have these minimum requirements: 1. Easy online collaboration between identified participants. 2. Ability to allow/deny specific users access to specific documents (particularly for editing). 3. Easy to learn the markup to lower barriers to entry (docs are less sexy than code, let's make it easy to get into them ;-) 4. Easy to translate the document source to multiple output formats, targets, and languages. 5. Fast turnaround between edits and displayed results. 6. A comment system so that users who are not allowed to edit directly can still be heard within context. What are the other requirements for the PEAR document creation/editing/delivery system?

Is there anything I missed in that list? Are there things in that list which do not belong?

DocBook fits the bill.

That is not an answer to the question; you are talking technology, not requirements, and skipping vital parts of the decision process.

The problem is authors, not the format.

The two may be related; in fact, I would argue they are intimately related, along with the mechanism for creating, editing, and generating the docs. -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/