[Bf-docboard] About MediaWiki and DocBook

Sun Aug 21 06:06:14 CEST 2005

Hello,

I tried to stay out of the first round of this discussion to see  
where it went.  After several weeks of viewing the product, and  
progress I have concluded that mediawiki is not as matured a product  
as DocBook.

> Take a look at this page: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/ 
> Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro?action=render  (compare it to http:// 
> en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro) ... it will already  
> output straight HTML for us without all the mediawiki stuff in the  
> way, and if you take a look at the source of the page, it outputs  
> it without <body> <head> <html> etc tags that will just get in our  
> way, so it will be simple to write a script to append all these  
> pages together into a single large HTML document.

Your having me compare two pages that are exactly the same.  Choosing  
a link in the table of contents takes me to all that website crap  
with the frills, low res images and a lacking book like structure.  A  
single large HTML document? I'm sorry but I think that would take a  
while to load.

> Linux has a very nifty tool to generate a PDF from an HTML file  
> called htmldoc.  There's many more conversion tools out there.   
> Converting HTML to PDF these days is trivial.

For a simple handout it's trivial, sending it to your 4 color offset  
press operator is a different story :)  And there I'm afraid your  
htmldoc idea falls apart without EXTENSIVE knowledge of htmldoc,  
which can be tricky without it chopping pages in half. Besides with  
any gui XML editor, outputting to pdf is one button push.

> Someone pointed out to me that some German wikipedia users already  
> print and sell content they've created in wikimedia.  The page is  
> in German but here's a URL with the Google translate tool  
> translating it to English:

Some German guy versus 150 converters for XML.
>
> Mediawiki also uses CSS for both layout and looks... easily  
> editable text files... no advantage here...

No advantage here, but alot easier to do than a mediawiki parsing  
script, or tedious htmldoc usage, trying to make this easier not more  
difficult.  I also think its a good idea to generate revenue for the  
Blender Foundation by first releasing a print version before on-line  
docs become available.

> Is there something I'm missing?  Perhaps I didn't understand what  
> you were trying to say.

Yes, your missing the fact that this is not a purely html document,  
and thats where mediawiki shines, I think this is first and foremost  
a print document... made available later to web.  So hopefully you  
now know what I'm trying to say.

my pants are on fire!
JS

P.S.  I began working on a CSS for the Blender Documentation and  
tried fitting it into typo3... forgot my sandbox account though, when  
I remember it, should look better.  This was a very quick hack just  
to try and prove you don't need to write a single xml tag, and to  
also have the docs look less plain. Workflow was quick write-up in  
xml editor, outputted to .eps, .pdf, and .html... the html was then  
morphed into typo.  Looks pretty good I think.  http:// 
home.earthlink.net/~jaspermine/test/Test.html Some other files in  
there as well.

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