Re: WIP: asciidoc replacement

From: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org>
Date: Oct 3, 2007, 13:47 UTC
Message-ID: <20071003134741.GQ21675@fieldses.org>
In-Reply-To: <85k5q4v6jb.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 12:25:44PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> writes:
> 
> > El 3/10/2007, a las 10:12, David Kastrup escribió:
> >
> >> What with output in print, HTML, info?
> >
> > Yes, that's still a problem...
> >
> >> Personally, I think it might make sense to just step away from the
> >> AsciiDoc documentation to Docbook: plain text (without cutified
> >> formatting control like in AsciiDoc) can be generated _from_ Docbook.
> >
> > Yes, but editing DocBook (XML) is relatively painful compared to
> > editing plain text.
> 
> The problem is that we are not editing plain text, but Docbook source
> masquerading as plain text.

I do a fair amount of editing of the asciidoc source, but 99% of it is done by just blind imitation of what's already there. I've never learned docbook (I've barely learned asciidoc, to be honest), and with a few (now forgotten) exceptions haven't tried to understand how the toolchain works.

Maybe my experience would be the same with Docbook--I have no idea, never having worked with it--but if you're suggesting that knowledge of Docbook is a prerequisite for working with asciidoc, that certainly hasn't been my experience.

Show 6 quoted lines

> But it is not all _all_ easily writeable the moment you try to do
> something with _structural_ impact.  In fact, it is pretty much
> impossible for anybody except wizards to do that.  And when the
> wizards do it, they can't actually document what they have been doing
> since that would mean cluttering the purported "plain text
> documentation" with formatting comments.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here.  Example?

--b.