Re: [boost] Boost documentation

From: Stefan Seefeld (seefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-07-01 21:40:18

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Sun Jun 24 2007, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld-AT-sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
>> David Abrahams wrote:
>>> on Sat Jun 23 2007, "Gennadiy Rozental" <gennadiy.rozental-AT-thomson.com> wrote:
>>>> There several WYSWYG editors producing DocBook (and I don't need to
>>>> enter markup at all!) and this trend is going to grow.
>>> Yeah, but we need to represent semantic information (e.g. Concepts)
>>> that are outside the builtin representational abilities of DocBook.
>> DocBook is designed for extensibility. 
> 
> I know.  That's why I said *builtin*.
> 
> BoostBook is just an extension of DocBook, using expressly-designed
> hooks in DocBook for that purpose.  I don't consider that an NIH move
> on our part; quite the contrary.

Yes, understood. With NIH I'm not referring to BoostBook, but to QuickBook,
which is neither an extension to DocBook, nor ReST. Thus, no existing
parser will work with it, no existing documentation will help, and no
existing community can answer questions and help resolve issues.

(For the record: I did bring up the BoostBook extension on the #docbook
IRC channel, and people, including Norman Walsh, where quite favorable
to the idea of getting BoostBook or a variant thereof integrated into
DocBook, if only as a 'C++ profile'. That would make it easier to let
it evolve together with DocBook, and would help boost developers focus
on the Real Stuff. ;-) )

>>> How well will these WYSIWYG editors handle BoostBook's special tags?
>> I'm not aware of fany DocBook editors, only XML editors. And these don't
>> notice 'special tags'. You feed them a document type (DTD, RelaxNG, XSchema, etc.),
>> and they Just Work.
> 
> Yeah, well Gennadiy cited WYSIWYG.
> 
>>> Which editors are these, BTW?
>> The one I have run across is xxe (http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/). But
>> I'm mostly using (x)emacs, which has its own xml-editing modes that will
>> happily accept any customization layer, too.
> 
> Yeah, that's fine too; I use emacs.  It's just not quite
> WYSIWYG... not that it's a problem for me.

There are (as you surely know) long discussions about the WYSIWYG paradigm,
and by what that could be replaced in the context of structured documents.
However, for all practical purposes, I do consider the above editor (xxe)
to be WYSIWYG. People do have a choice, if they really want.

FWIW,
                Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...