[Bf-docboard] About MediaWiki and DocBook

[Jasper Mine]

Hello,

By choosing MediaWiki you are limiting the manual to less forms of  
output.  I mean by this html, pdf, print, etc.

DocBooks html presentation can be customized by a cascading style  
sheet, and as you know, used extensively for websites.  I believe  
this also carries over to print?  All it takes is someone to create  
this CSS for the Blenders' readers.

Also there is a myriad of converters for xml to many formats versus  
the very few for MediaWiki... the manual is not only for web, but  
also for print. Two versions of the manual would be superfluous.

As far as syntax of xml is concerned, many XML text editors, some  
free, some commercial, make the XML tags almost transparent, leaving  
good ol' fashioned text editing as the hardest part, well that and  
conforming to a layout structure ie. Title, subsection, images etc.

Please see this document http://www.blender3d.org/cms/ 
Documenting_Blender.226.0.html and also http://download.blender.org/ 
documentation/html228/x20988.html
Ironically this is missing from the current manual, so this is where  
I will start, updating this section for 2.4 manual.

Check those xml editors out:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=XML 
+Editor&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ <--I use this
oXygen
http://www.xerlin.org/

MediaWiki does look good, and I see some smaller projects using it,  
however blender already has wiki facilities and these are good for  
the programmer to write functionality for new tools, these notes  
would be better transfered and expanded upon in XML for the manual.

my two cents,
JS

On Aug 19, 2005, at 5:32 PM, supadupafly131 at free.fr wrote:

> So just about the design itself, I think that MediaWiki is nicer  
> than a standard
> DocBook presentation, it could give Blenders' readers a nice  
> overview of the
> program. So me and Mum think it's nicer :D
>
> .Damien.
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