Re: Style Guide (was Re: I'm a sucker)

[David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>]

Jorge et al:

> Not if the feedback has comments such as 'Nice document! How about
> improving it adding this thing?'. It's the author's decision to
> include something or to ommit something.

That much is true. The author might also be thankful that she didn't
have to add that whole chapter on cryptography to her document and that
others submitted patches or wot not to her. This is a turning stone of
open source - someone (the author, committee, dictator, or wotever) has
to approve additions and patches but everyone is free to submit one or
many of them.

>     DL> My point is that DTD's and other schema (for want of a better word) help
>     DL> create valid documents. The XML specification is quite clear on this -
>     DL> whilst a document may be well-formed it is not necessarily valid. And
>     DL> because we can't expect XML parsers to be telepathic they must be
>     DL> provided with a DTD.
> 
> I don't follow your point here... What does DTDs and XML or SGML
> documents have to do with the problem of what's in the document?

As another thread has pointed out they can help clarify the semantics of
a document. One example that jumps out at me is that you can't have an
untitled book in DocBook. Noone is likely to forget the title, but if
you have some sort of structured  DTD or other validating document it
helps people to write valid documents.

> This is good... Every contribution is valid. And constructive
> criticism too. But lets try to be clear. It's hard to follow vague
> phrases after a full working day.

Language, by definition, is vague.

> Imagine this guy reading the list...

One needs to draw a line between communicating naturally, taking into
account everyone's cultural and linguistic needs and sounding stilted
and/or out of style. Unfortunately, I have attempted to use such machine
translators as "babelfish" or the one at dictionary.com and they can
genuinely !@#$ up a really simple sentence whilst getting horrendeously
complex ones almost if not absolutely correct :-)

DL
-- 
And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That a face that at first was ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale....


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to ldp-discuss-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org