Re: Documentation files in html format?

[Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>]

Randy Dunlap wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:17:19 +0200 Willy Tarreau wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 10:19:25AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
>>> I was just suggesting that if we took your suggestion of standardizing
>>> on plain text plus some conventions for formatting lists and headers and
>>> such, one easy way to do that might just be to adopt the asciidoc format
>>> (or some subset thereof).  Is there any part of the asciidoc *syntax*
>>> that you object to?
>> Not particularly. It's just slightly less readable as plain text but
>> OTOH produces nice documents when you have a working toolchain. But
>> that's a language which needs to be learned, as every such language.
>> Plain text on the contrary, requires no learning. The conventions are
>> more like suggestions to newcomers. Everyone is free to proceed as he
>> wants, judging by the result while writing the text.

> but if we use something richer than plain text, I think that we
> shouldn't need to invent yet another markup language.
> Just use HTML or asciidoc or MarkDown etc...

*If* we switch to a markup language instead of plaintext (or instead of
plaintext with style recommendations), then submitters should at least
be able to do basic syntax checks without having a toolchain installed.

E.g. provide a scripts/checkdocumentation.p[ly] similar in function to
scripts/checkpatch.pl.  (OK, that one requires a perl interpreter
installed, but that's a fair requirement.)

One note on asciidoc:  I experienced the same as Willy when I wanted to
build git with manpages on a distribution without prebuilt asciidoc.
And when I finally managed to build a minimum asciidoc setup, I was
bitten by a syntax change in the asciidoc language, requiring a small
change to git's documentation source to be compatible with both asciidoc
7.x and asciidoc 8.x IIRC.
-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=== =--- -==--
http://arcgraph.de/sr/