Re: (off topic?) Docbook? Re: manlint?

[John Gardner]

>
> Complain about Markdown all you will, and use weird-arse corner cases to
> show it’s Bad, but GFM can handle a lot of everyday text.


Markdown has only one feature: readability.

Prove me wrong.

On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 14:14, Larry Kollar <larry.kollar@me.com> wrote:

> A little late to the party, but I do have some experience here.
>
> > I assume the reference to Docbook, which might indeed capsize
> > like an overweight freighter, but XML is such a simple and robust
> > form of structuring documents that it's going to outlast us all.
>
> I’m not going to pronounce Docbook dead, but open-source projects
> that use it (or Texinfo) have accidentally erected a barrier to entry for
> people who want to contribute to the documentation. They would be
> much better served by adopting Lightweight DITA, which can ingest
> HTML5 and Github-Flavored Markdown alongside DITA XML (and
> convert any type to any other type). Complain about Markdown all you
> will, and use weird-arse corner cases to show it’s Bad, but GFM can
> handle a lot of everyday text.
>
> XML is a stripped-down form of SGML. Much of what was stripped
> involved conveniences for people working directly with the markup.
> They may as well have stripped entities as well, because I’ve never
> seen them actually used (most XML-based markup languages have
> their own methods of defining and using variables). Yes, JSON and
> CSV (and Markdown, for that matter) are a lot easier to output from
> an awk script… but for input, there are several decent XML parsers
> for awk while TSV/CSV/JSON parsers have severe limitations. I had
> to learn enough Python to deal with a couple of work projects that
> involved CSV and JSON input.
>
> OK, let’s move to *roff for a moment. It can do most of the things
> that DITA advocates tout: reusable topics, conditionals, variables,
> insertions, and so forth (you can get a *lot* of mileage out of .so).
> Most of the -ms macros that come before the first .LP or .NH are
> considered book metadata in DITA, so metadata is covered. What
> *roff doesn’t do is produce usable HTML output. Yet.
>
> Yeah, XSLT sucks like pure vacuum. All that’s keeping it alive is the
> lack of a decent open-source (or even reasonably-priced) CSS3
> processor. If one becomes available, you’ll see people abandoning
> XSLT as fast as they can.
>
> — Larry
>