RE: Authorship

["Anthony E. Greene" <agreene@pobox.com>]

At 21:40 2000-05-30 -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
>I'd like to see us adopt some more formal conventions, and have them better
>stated.  We could even provide a short section that people could just block
>include into their HOWTOs that shows the general conventions.

As a potential HOWTO author, I like this idea.

>> >I've read the HOWTO-HOWTO and the section on style is very brief.
>> Is there
>> more guidance on how a HOWTO should be structured?
[snip]
>Was the question about Markup style, or about writing style?  They're
>completely different, and both completely undefined.  

This was my question. It was about markup style and standard information to
include. A section on conventions is a good example of what I mean. The
HOWTOs are pretty easy to read, but having markup standards and standard
sections that may be copied in or included as an entity would be a step in
the right direction. The LDP docs would then be more consistent and
therefore a little easier to use. If done well, it would be possible to
build a database of some of the information (then again there's always grep).

>> >Does the LDP accept HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs using the DocBook DTD?
>> 
>> A question that should be definitively answered.

This was also my question. The posted manifesto, dated 13-Feb-2000, says:
"All HOWTO documents (including mini-HOWTOs) must be in SGML format using
the linuxdoc DTD, which is quite simple. We are considering migrating to
the DocBook DTD."

The answers I got to this question made it very clear that DocBook is the
way to go. The manifesto and the HOWTO-HOWTO both need a minor update on
this point. I guess now would be a good time for me to get a CVS account ;-)
 
>I think it would be nice to use Stein's template as THE template.  There are
>now DocBook and Linuxdoc versions (as of earlier today I created a DocBook
>version).  I disagree with some of the markup, and more of the content, but
>I'll get to those soon.  

This is something I'm interested in. After reading several HOWTOs, I really
think they're good, but could stand some standardization. Templates would
help this and help potential authors get started.


 Tony
 --
 Anthony E. Greene <agreene@pobox.com>
 PGP Key: 0x6C94239D/7B3D BD7D 7D91 1B44 BA26  C484 A42A 60DD 6C94 239D
 If it's too good to be true, it's probably Linux


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