Re: [seul-edu] School Networking Guide

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

Doug -- I don't want to get caught up in a contentious debate here. But I do
want us to think carefully about whether a standard constitutes an important
requirement or an unneeded barrier. 

In this case, the project we are discussing will, as far as I can tell, be
the FIRST substantive output of the "guide" project -- at least the URL for
guides, http://www.seul.org/edu/docs/docprojects.html, appears to contain
only a "wish list" of titles without associated authors, plus a single set
of existing guides, the ones about how to use DocBook (not surprising that
the author of that set is willing to use DocBook, right?). 

Since the guides project is, as I recall, about a year old, using this
opportunity to reconsider its standards seems to me like a natural
consequence of the fact that there has been no rush of volunteers for the
project.

Although you were replying specifically to Manuel, it's not just "one
person" who questions the DocBook standard, at least as something forced on
all writers. In asking for DocBook conversion to be a designeted role on
this possible project, I was certainly suggesting my own dislike of it,
along with my suspicion that we will have better luck recruiting other
volunteer writers if they are permitted to concentrate on writing, not
desktop publishing. 

A few months ago, I was working on a big documentation project for another
group. Some of my co-authors became enthusiastic about moving the whole
thing to DocBook. I spent a week trying to get the hang of using Xemacs to
create DocBook stuff (a real chore for me, since I'm from the vi side of the
street). I then spent some time, a bit more successfully, getting LyX to
create DocBooks. 

In the end, I could do it, but I found it was taking me 5 minutes to make
each small change, the sort I could make in 15 seconds in a straight text
document. SOme of this was DocBook, some of it the newness of LyX. All of it
was a distraction from substantive writing. And two weeks of messing with
trying to learn to do it cut my writing time to zero. The project lost
momentum and now sits moribund at Sourceforge.

Thee are certainly some vocal proponents of DocBooks here. Aside from Bill
Tihan who wrote the DocBook tutorial and related documents), what are they
writing for SEUL/edu using the standard they advocate? Why not add to the
listing at http://www.seul.org/edu/docs/docprojects.html a directory of
people who will do text to DocBook conversions for authors and see if that
offer encourages people to write some of the listed documents (or other,
unlisted ones)?

In the end, my concern is that whatever DTP standard we adopt, SEUL/edu
should recognize that DTP is a specialized skill just as much as programming
is. To adopt DocBook (or anything else beyond unadorned text) as a
publishing standard is fine; to impose is as a skill requirement on every
author who volunteers is not, in that it is counterproductive to efforts to
recruit authors (at least, I think it is).

LATE ADDITION -- after I wrote what appears above, I saw Bill's message in
which he offers to take on this exact role. For purposes of this proposed
project, that closes the issue for me, and I look forward now to hearing
from people with suggestions for, or who will volunteer to write, the actual
content. 

At 08:53 AM 9/3/00 EDT, Douglas Loss wrote:
...
>You're certainly welcome to not like it, but Bill Tihen and
>Ramin (I know I can't spell his last name properly) put a lot of
>thought and effort into our documentation standards and decided
>on DocBook.  We're not going to change that because one person
>has a different opinion.
...
>We're not forcing anyone to follow our requirements.  If you
>don't like them, start your own documentation project.  That's
>the essence of what this community stands for, after all.


--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray@comarre.com        
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