Re: [Phpgroupware-docteam] Yes I said something Crazy about the manual

[brandonne]

>
>Cool. I will check it out.

I think I showed you the program at one time,  I have the output of it up on my 
machine, which is unfortunatly not up at the moment.

>
>> 
>> My one caveat about this whole project is it seems to be getting 
>> exponentially more complicated.  We don't even have a decent basic system 
>> working and we worried about exporting to as yet unknown apps.
>> I don't understand why the documentation has to be exportable, it's written 
>> specifically for this app, not for another client or server.  It's hard 
>> enough that we have to deal with multiple themes, it will be even harder if 
>> we have to consider different clients.
>> We can still have precompiled HTML along with the SGML on the same machine, 
>> of all things, file system space should fall far below performance in 
>> priorities.
>> 
>
>I agree. I think the talk about docbook has been over blown, and I think
>a point I keep making is being overlooked/unnoticed.
>I *dont* want our docs to be written in DocBook. I want to come up with
>some *very* limited number of tags for our own custom xml documentation.
>It would only need maybe 10 tags for everything we want. Since this will
>then be a very basic xml file, it will be very easy to turn it into html
>using some template for the manual. It can be converted to text very
>easily, can be turned into real docbook by directly mapping some of our
>tags (which will be, as I said a very limited subset).
>So for the manual, I want to read these xml files and generate html on
>the fly. This way any app that the user has rights to will seamlessly
>plugin. We can also make sure one of the tags can be used for an inline
>help system.

Each app is written as a separate text file, and the html output from the xml 
is also as separate text files, possibly along with a table of contents, having 
it seamlessly plug in, so that the user only sees the apps they have in the 
manual shouldn't be an issue.

My primary reason for using DocBook was that all the DSSSL's for pdf, text, ps, 
and html are already there.  Admittedly we will still have to write a DSSSL for 
the online manual, but that is still far less work.  We are only using a small 
subset of of Docbook tags, so the writer really doesn't have to know DocBook.  
What I'm failing to understand is why we need to export the user manual as XML 
to other clients and servers, It's really only intended to be aplicable to the 
web interface.

>For the developer docs I want to have a javadoc type comments in the
>code with a few extras so that we can generate WSDL. WSDL can be done
>dynamicly, or staticly. The html/text and such will be done staticly
>with some script.

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