[Typo3-doc] Reason for dropping DocBook...

[Jean-Marie Schweizer]

> Hm. It *was* relevant to the discussion. And you don't seem to know those
> editors, too, as you write "supposed to". I'd *love* to know about a good,
> user friendly (and preferably free) editor (that isn't called emacs[1]).
> 
> If there isn't a free editor for such purposes, it *must* be (very)
> affordable, otherwise you lock people out.

http://dbkeditor.sourceforge.net/
http://www.epcedit.com/
http://gnomedesktop.org/node/1151
http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/index.html
etc.

Also OpenOffice can import/export DocBook. Abiword can at least import 
it and even Microsoft has some solution for Word.

>>Where you part of the project? I only know of the above having been
>>involved.
> 
> Well, I was at least involved when Robert, Sebastian and Ignmar thought
> about it. And I was involved when we talked about the pros and cons of
> DocBook, and the need for an easy to use editor, and the possible
> toolchain.
> 
> The actual decision against DocBook was made later, but I'm sure it was
> largely the question of available editors, that made the point.

See above... Hence my point.

>>Are you talking about DocBook? Where did you experience the complexity
>>in it? Why would major open source projects work with DocBook?
> 
> Yes, I am talking about DocBook. Just because I did write it in emacs, this
> doesn't mean it's not complex.
> 
> I wrote "in writing it", and without a good editor, this is hard. Even if
> you have an editor, you still have a lot of possibilities to mark up
> certain things (lists, filenames, figures, acronyms, ...).

True. As I stated before we would talk about 20 to 30 markup tags to 
learn. That should do it. My experince lies within LaTeX and I didn't 
use more than 10 tags to write documentations, articles and books (apart 
from configuration).

> All this can be very confusing, for technically inclinced people, and even
> more for people that just want to write documentation about TYPO3 - and
> don't want to become a trained technical writer before they can start.

I realize that and that's why I'm not talking about using DocBook as a 
replacement for Wiki or timtaw but as an overall documentation format 
for future professional structured documentations (please see my 
previous posts)

> A lot of projects work with DocBook, true. I'd love to work with it more.
> Sigh. :/

I'm not so sure if DocBook would be good or not. I actually like the 
Wiki a lot but also see its limitations that cannot stand if we want to 
start building a professinal documentation suite.

That's why I'd like to know more about the reasons for dropping it than 
just that there wasn't an editor for it. Of course, if there were no 
more reasons... I'll just have to live with that. :-)

Jean-Marie