[DotGNU]Newbies questions, Tex, gnome, topposting

[Tomislav Sajdl]

About newbies question

No matter of nearly two months of reading this mail list, I still consider 
myself as a newbie. In a moment when I tried to figure out what it is all 
about, I wasn't able to find too much information. List archive helps, but 
not too much. Same for web resources. Most of thing I figured out on IRC. 
I wished to make some introduction paper, but there are people who are far 
more familiar to whole project than I am. I think that few hours of their 
work could help a lot. My humble proposal of topics (based upon my own 
misunderstanding):

DotGNU - pNet relation
List of in charge persons for all parts of project
Basic list of communication standards (or, because we don't have it yet - 
list of possible standards)

This shouldn't be too long paper, but it could really help a lot.

I call other newbies to add what things they were not able to figure out. 
Let us make FAQ what its acronym stands for.

About Tex, WYSIWYG and so

Writing in WYSIWYG tools seems nice, but it is totally inappropriate for 
large texts. IIRC, LaTeX had idea of "what you see is what you mean". I 
strongly recommend such approach.

Some XML based tool (even) with some totally inflexible UI may help a 
lot. Have in mind that our documents should not be much more than set of 
paragraphs, with a mark what that paragraph means (ie. heading, 
introduction, plain text, bulleting list, example, "see also") [and we 
need hyperlinks]. Word processing tool give you much more freedom, but 
they have to be most general as they can be.

GNOME and .net

I'm a bit suspicious about Miguel's ideas... DotGNU's approach is normal - 
MS offers .NET, we say "OK, nice thing (BTW it already exists) and we will 
offer something more valuable than yours". But Icasa's ideas IMHO give too 
much publicity to MS, making people to believe that .NET is solution for 
everything... If he wanted to make GNOME platform independent, he was able 
to do it on many different ways, none of them MS dependent.

I suspect if he is able to notice basic problems. Miguel wasn't able to 
figure simple thing: maybe GNOME is better in its core idea, but KDE won 
(no flamewars, please) just because of niftier UI. And it is just few 
months (maybe even weeks) of decent designer's work...


And last but not least: DO NOT TOPPOST, PLEASE!

It makes list digest totally impossible to read. And, please, remove 
unimportant parts of cited messages. Have in mind that these messages go 
to archive.

Greetings, 
Tomislav Sajdl