ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kevin,

On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 18:17 -0500, Kevin Godby wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:56 PM, Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Sorry to change tack slightly, but I'm wondering whether the format
> > discussion should be deferred until some more important issues are
> > resolved. If we choose an XML format, we can always transform to other
> > formats with a bit of work.
> 
> That's true to a degree.  But if one format has more granular tags
> than another, it's hard to convert from the more general format to the
> more granular format.  (It's easy to swap one tag for another or to
> remove unnecessary tags, but it's hard to add them.)

That's certainly true in theory, but I don't believe that it's a serious
problem for us in practise. In my experience, few tags are actually
required to give good semantic coverage. Additions to the
frequently-used "core" set of tags tend to cover rare edge cases, where
existing tags could be slightly abused with no ill effect. Often, the
extra tags are displayed in the same way as an existing tag anyway.

I don't think that there's a significant risk of choosing something
that's semantically too poor. We could even use HTML with different
classes for spans and divs if we wanted to!

> (Did I stray wildly off-topic and completely forget to answer your question?)

Eek, yes, although your discussion of translations was definitely
valuable. I still think the editing issue needs to be addressed with
some urgency, though. I'm worried that, after editing has finished, few
messages will have been left intact, and the translators will have to
redo pretty much everything.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull
Book - http://nostarch.com/ubuntu4.htm