Re: yelp performance (Re: Successor to DocBook)

[Karl Eichwalder <ke suse de>]

Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> writes:

> Yelp does not validate documents at runtime.  Currently,
> gnome-doc-utils validates documents on 'make check'.
> I have considered validating on make, but we'd have to
> use some sort of hackish stamp files to prevent it from
> revalidating all the time.  People should be building
> tarballs with 'make distcheck' anyway.  Validating at
> installation time seems like a good idea.

But not again during the scrollkeeper registration time ;)  "make
distcheck" is good enough, but developers have to get used to this
target.

> The problem with installing cooked documents is that
> the user is stuck with the presentation you went with
> when you created the HTML (or whatever else you turned
> it into).

I don't want you to install HTML files, but only simplified or
normalized XML files--for example, HTML modeled tables instead of CALS
tables.

> (As an aside, I often call Texinfo a great idea, done
> poorly.  It got a lot of things right, but a number of
> design decisions (flaws in my book, maybe not others'
> books) have relegated it to the niche geek tool it is
> today.  Done differently, I believe Texinfo could have
> become the single documentation format for everything,
> including the desktop.)

During the last year, Karl Berry and friends improved Texinfo in many
areas, probably too late, to make it an option instead of XML: First of
all, they added table, image and some i18n/l10n support; then there are
now more output formats: HTML and 2 XML flavors (Texinfo and DocBook).
If you are interested in high quality books _now_, Texinfo is still the
best input format.

But if you work in a distributed context with many team members, XML
probably is a better choice.

-- 
Karl Eichwalder
R&D / Documentation                         SUSE Linux Products GmbH

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