RE: Linux documentation tools

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

Jim Shaeffer wrote

> Then most of us will abandon all further research into
> and consideration of these tools. The difficulties
> inherent in retraining authors/contributors are the
> very difficulties we were hoping to resolve by using
> new tools that would enforce and impose structure.

The point of markup is to capture semantics. The semantics involved are the
semantics known to the authors. The whole point is to capture not only the
content but the things that the authors know about the content. You cannot
impose useful structure over the ignorance of the users. Author-friendly
markup language design helps here (and is all too rare), but you have to
train the authors.

On the tool front, it is worth noting that current DTP tools all have
specific semantics. The role of the editor is to allow the user to work with
the particular semantics of the application. This is not always clear when
you compare Word to XML, but if you compare Excel to XML you quickly get the
point. You can, of course, create an XML document that contains rows and
columns and in which the cells can contain either values or formulas. But
compare working with that document in a generic XML editor or a text editor
with working with the same document in Excel and you see the kind of ease of
use you get from working with an editor that is designed specifically for
the semantics of the data format.

XML editors can only provide support for working with XML syntax, not for
working with the semantics of a particular markup language. I don't see how
XML editors can really get significantly easier to use than they already
are. The key to ease of use is in the semantics of the application. The
semantics of a structured XML language are custom semantics. A generic
editor can't support them and users have to know them. There really is no
avoiding it.

Some XML editors do come with a DOCBOOK skin over the generic XML editor,
but that is not the same as a dedicated DOCBOOK editor, nor it is clear how
all the semantics of DOCBOOK could be represented accurately in a WYSIWYG
environment.

---
Mark Baker
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