Subject: Re: DSSSL Documentation Project? From: Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 22:26:20 -0400 (EDT) |
At 9 Jun 1997 10:46 +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > I am all in favour of a DSSSL Documentation Project. But I come up > against a problem - what would be really useful would be a copy of the > standard with a TOC, an index, and running heads. And we are The front matter -- including a ToC -- for the PDF and Postscript versions of the standard are on the WG8 ftp site as, I believe, dsssl96f.pdf and dsssl96f.ps, respectively. That only addresses the least part of your problem, however, and I don't know how you're going to get running heads and (wonder of wonders) an index unless James Clark writes the DSSSL analogue of "The SGML Handbook". > constrained from doing that by copyright etc. The indices by eg Harvey > Bingham are nice, but i'd really like them more tightly bound to the > text, so that I end up with a book I can keep open on my desk. The text of the standard is useful to you, but I'm postulating that there are people starting out with DSSSL who want something simpler with more hand-holding than the precise wording of an International Standard. > Half the time you want a cookbook; the other half of the time you want > a reliable reference. Well, actually what I really want is the > reliable reference, but with more worked examples _in situ_ Half the time I do want a cookbook and all of the time I do want a reliable reference with lots of worked examples, and I'm sure there are more than just us two who want the same thing. My premise for starting this thread is that not only are there many people who want that sort of thing, but there are many people who are able (and, I hope, willing) to contribute some part towards creating it. As yet there hasn't been a way for a small effort to make a visible difference, and we are fortunate that some people have had the time and the energy to each singlehandedly create one of the tutorials or reference pieces that we have so far, but we are still lacking the "reliable reference with lots of worked examples" and, I would hazard, we are still lacking sufficient entry-level material. Think of what I am proposing as a mosaic (the thing made of tiles, not the web browser): the mechanism for coordinating the effort and disseminating the results is the wall on which the mosaic is built; the way we structure the documentation into "man pages", cookbook items, tutorial sections, introductions, and detailed discussions for the DSSSL language lawyers, etc., is the pattern for the mosaic; and the individual items of documentation are the tiles making up the mosaic. It doesn't matter if some pieces are bigger than others and it won't look like much of a picture to begin with, but you can eventually make something quite good out of a lot of disparate pieces. Regards, Tony Graham ======================================================================= Tony Graham, Consultant Mulberry Technologies, Inc. Phone: 301-231-6931 6010 Executive Blvd., Suite 608 Fax: 301-231-6935 Rockville, MD USA 20852 email: tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ======================================================================= DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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