Shared documentation system

[Murphy]

Hey'

On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 18:10:08 -0600 Shaun McCance wrote:

> This presents a problem for third-party software, though.  When ISVs
> develop documentation for their applications, what do they do?  If they
> have to jump through hoops to make it work with different desktops, then
> they probably just won't bother.  They'll put it in HTML and open a
> webbrowser.

Exactly.  I'm beginning to write documentation for the gtk-gnutella
project.  The developers plan to separate the project into a library and
frontend to lower the bar for new gui devs.  So we may see gnome-gnutella
and knutella frontends based on the lib.  I want my documentation to be
somewhat reusable in both these cases so I'll be writing in docbook-xml
and be using the American Heritage Dictionary for spelling (never easy for
a Canadian!)  But after that, differences in the gnome and kde styleguides
mean that reusability will be limited depending on whether I use one, the
other, or more likely something in between.

Arguments as to which tag should be at the top level of a user guide, etc
are completely uninteresting to me.  I just wish to make as little
redundant work for future maintainers and contributors of my docs as
possible.  I was kind of hoping that a common styleguide could be
developed so those hypothetical frontend devs would not have to mark up
the docs all over again to get their projects included in gnome or kde. 
However, this may be unrealistic so perhaps more adaptable help systems
would be better.  And, after all, we can't forget whatever GnuStep, etc
help systems there are or may be in future.

--
Murphy