Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: finding answers quickly

[Thomas Lord]

    > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>

    >     William> Have a look at http://docutils.sf.net,

    > This is the Python docutils that provides reStructuredText.

    > It's nice as far as it goes, and I use it myself.  But as Andrew
    > Suffield pointed out, it's just POD by another name and syntax, and
    > tla already has one of those (although it's currently rather hard to
    > use since it requires systas scheme).  So that's three that have been
    > mentioned.

I think of the screwy doc format used in libhackerlab and the tla
tutorial a particularly interesting variation on the wiki-syntax
theme:

It is *intended* to be a close-to-plain-text format, quite readable
(and even hyperlinkable) in source form.   It is intended to have a 
tasteful mix of structural (semantic) and presentation markups.
It is intended to be relatively trivial to parse and process.  It is
intended to have decent translations into HTML, TeX, and directly
(i.e., not necessarily via TeX) to the printed page.

That particular wiki-like-language is, in my now several-years
experience with it, very close, but not quite right.  It has a few,
serious glitches.

At the same time, I've yet to see a competing language with similar
goals that does better.

I don't think that the absense of a better example indicates that one
can't be made.  Rather, I think it's just one of the many things on
that very long list of not-very-difficult hacks that hasn't been done
*yet*.

So, as I vaguely understand the original topic: i don't care what
folks do with the wiki docs, of course (since it isn't my place to
care about that) but, for internal-to-project documentation --- yes,
we do have to move past the system currently used but as things stand,
I'm in favor of a brief little side project to make something similar
to what's currently used, but much better.

-t