[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Question about bug 8206

[Miles Bader]

"Mark A. Flacy" <address@hidden> writes:
> Miles> I've never written a document in docbook, but for the same
> Miles> reason it looks like pure drudgery to write if you're not using
> Miles> rather heavy editor magic.
>
> I have.  I've never written a texinfo document (at all) but I cannot
> imagine that to be an improvement over docbook.

It's certainly far more _readable_ as source than docbook.  Much of this
is simple brevity, which incidentally helps authors too.

> Miles> I would never consider docbook an acceptable source form as
> Miles> long as people expect to able to reasonably edit the sources as
> Miles> raw text.
>
> A vanishingly small number of potential markup languages fit that bill.

Actually many do:  texinfo, scribe, latex (slightly less obvious because
of the weird quirks latex inherits from tex, but still, simple latex is,
well, simple, and readable).  It is more common in "classic" markup
languages, I suppose partly because more people use magic editors these
days instead of plain text markup languages, and partly because the
xml/sgml disease has spread recently.

-Miles
-- 
Come now, if we were really planning to harm you, would we be waiting here,
 beside the path, in the very darkest part of the forest?