15 May
2018
15 May
'18
6:55 p.m.
Arnold wrote:
> DocBook. Bleah.
Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get
all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
He argues that decent-quality output, e.g. PDF, isn't required any more.
He's wrong about that, and also that DocBook is wonderful. It's great
for machine processing (which is why O'Reilly likes it) but it's AWFUL
for the human author.
In fact, it's so bad that these days O'Reilly uses AsciiDoc with a
toolchain to convert to DocBook for printing.
Interesting reading (I skimmed it), but I will never switch any of
my man pages over to DocBook.
My two cents (as we wander even further afield),
Arnold