[Vorbis-dev] Why Docbook and XML in the first place ??

[Yann GUIDON]

Hi !

Michael Crawford wrote:
> Please understand that the reason I'm posting this is to give you a
> current, debugged example of publishing DocBook documents - not to get
> you working on ZooLib's documentation!
> 
> I hope this helps.
I hope too and thank you for your help !

But now (this question is not directed to you but to the Vorbis devs in general),
why, oh why, is it necessary to build the docs from XML to PDF when
the major doc consumption format is HTML ???

Years ago, I wrote my master thesis in HTML, and converted it
to PDF with HTMLDOC so it coud be printed. But nobody cares about
printed material in the 21th century :-/ Who reads docs anyway ?


Now imagine someone who installs the vorbis sources and
it fails because of XML problems. I thought that Vorbis is about
sound and DSP and compression and what else, but not about
linuxities or packaging.

Oh, and in the 21th century, people who develop have
a web access : make sure the doc is up to date (and in HTML)
on the xiph site, and you will reduce your packaging burden.
Furthermore, and as noted before here, a special "printer-friendly" CSS
is all one needs. CSS was also designed for this purpose !
And SVG and MathML are supported by the browsers today,
unlike 10 or 5 years ago.

I also second the opinion that needing a network connexion for building
a local package is ... bad. Alright we all have Internet connexions
but there is a chicken-and-egg problem and IMHO, a package must
be self-contained, or else dependencies will make the distro explode.

Or imagine that you want to develop a Vorbis port, for example,
on a machine without framebuffer or X display. Vorbis wants Dockbook,
to generate PDF, so the conversion tool will want a PDF reader as
a dependency, for WHATEVER (or no) REASON, so the X package. Juste because
they "could", each package developer included the other in the
dependency constrains. Finally, the Vorbis package will not compile
because the platform has no graphics display. WTF ?


I hope that my remarks will help you concentrate on the
real issues of development, because i'm sure that the docbook issues
are minor and pointless. I may be mistaken, though.

Best regards,
> Mike
yg

-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org