[haiku] Re: GRRR! [was: Re: Man]
- From: Alex von Gluck <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:19:17 -0500
On Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:09:06 +0200, Oliver Tappe <zooey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I have asked a simple question: which format should we use for
> console-based documentation?
>
> It is rather obvious that once we have decided about the format, we will
> make sure to provide a console-based application that can actually
*show*
> the info [and yes, in a bloody console!].
+1, thank you sir.
>
> There might be other, additional ways to view the documentation, like in
> Web+ or some other GUI app, but that's not part of the question.
+1, Fair enough as long a console method exists.
> It doesn't make much sense to invent a *new* format, since all the
> documentation is already out there (usually in either man, info or html
> format). A new format would mean that we'd have to convert all the
> existing
> documentation to that. That's going to be much harder than converting
all
> the documentation to either man, info (gasp!) or html. For either of
> these,
> there are tools available that just work, AFAICT.
> Html is the format that bridges the gap between console/GUI best, and it
> is
> clearly superior to man for it's navigability (just try out the
> documentation for gcc and you'll see what I mean).
>
> However, I've always found console based browsers a bit awkward. That's
> why
> I'm asking: can we live with links (our console based browser, it seems)
> as
> console-based documentation viewer? Is w3m (or any other browser) better
> for that task?
I have an awesome idea for this. docbook.
Docbook is standardized and converts to and from many formats:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/ man to docbook
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/Html2DocBook html to docbook
docbook also will convert back to quite a few formats (including PDF and
html) and has built in functionality to store images.
I am sure there are console viewers out there for docbook as it's pretty
popular.
Thoughts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook
Thanks!
-- Alex
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