TYPO3 documentation file format (was: Re: [Typo3-doc] [german] Ich habe angefangen mit dem Wiki zu testen)

[Michael Stucki]

Hello Matthias,

I'm not sure if it's worth to spend some time for writing this, but I'll try
to clarify some facts:

> Gents, it becomes clear why there isn't so much documentation.

Ahem... but you know this page, don't you?
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/Matrix/

TYPO3 is one of the best documented projects. We don't have a problem of
missing documentation, rather it's a problem of too much documentation that
has to be structured in some way...

> I didn't expect that it turns to the childrens war "OpenSource <-->
> established software".

You're wrong! Back in the days when Kasper was writing that documentation
plugin for typo3.org, it was simply impossible to import Microsoft Office
documents into a useable format for displaying. However OpenOffice.org
already used XML output and it was perfectly ready to be used for this!

Since many users should be able to work on the same documentation, a
decision for a standard format had to be made, and as long as Microsoft
Office and OpenOffice.org are not compatible with each other, only one of
them could be chosen.

The decision for OOo has some big advantages compared to Microsoft Office:

- No lockout of non-Windows users (many people like me are running Linux
  exclusively!) Our documents collection would be much smaller in this case.

- Nobodoy is forced to buy a software license only for helping to write some
  documentation for an Open Source project

- TYPO3 is Open Source. Why should we force people to by a commercial
  product instead of helping to promote the (anyway better fitting) Open
  Source pendant?

> As long as kids want to fight this war, I say good bye to documentation.

Who's doing so? Actually it's YOU who should realize that it is a technical
problem! But yes, I like this situation since it has a nice side-effect to
bring more people in touch with OpenOffice.org...

In the little case that there is simply no possibility to bring OOo at your
company notebook, I suggest that you work on the Wiki in the meantime.
Chances are good that there will be a Wiki <-> OpenOffice.org conversion
one day...

If this wouldn't happen, it's still relatively easy to do copy&paste on a
machine that has OOo installed. The only important point is that the style
settings have to be hold...

Regards, michael
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