Wiki-like markup for Guide

[Florian Ebeling]

On 15.01.2009, at 02:13, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:

> C. Florian Ebeling wrote:
>>> And I think the more complex structured environment of DocBook has  
>>> been a
>>> benefit.  I realize that markdown (and other ones) support a  
>>> structure as
>>> well, but we'd I think we'd have to come up with a fairly complex  
>>> style
>>> guide for its use to support a consistent style to get the  
>>> functionality
>>> we now have.  In other words, we'd end up creating a DTD, which is  
>>> what
>>> DocBook is.  So my opinion is that it would take a lot of work to  
>>> get the
>>> functionality we now have, and we'd likely not do a good enough  
>>> job with a
>>> DTD to have as consistent a style as we have now.
>>
>> Ok, then let's just keep docbook. I thought other might consider it  
>> combersome
>> as well, but if that's not the case, then so be it :)
>
> I agree with Florian that editing our guide is not very easy. XML is a
> nice exchange format for structured data, but I don't like to edit  
> it by
> hand.
>
> Maybe we could consider asciidoc as it offers an easy syntax, but is  
> in
> fact a converter from ASCII to DocBook XML.
>
>  http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

I had a look at it and I really like it. It pretty much what I had in  
mind. Plus it has the additional benefit of covering the fully  
expressiveness of docbook.

I contacted the author already about the one question that remains  
open; unfortunately there isn't currently a translator from xml to the  
markup. However that's not an unsurmountable obstacle either.

Florian



>
>
> Rainer