Shared documentation system

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Saturday 03 January 2004 23:11, Shaun McCance wrote:
>
> At this point, I've basically agreed on desktop files as the metadata
> format.  KDE already uses this format, and I don't see any objections
> from any other parties.

Ok.

> So first we need to standardize on keys.  The desktop entry spec has a
> Type key.  I think this should be used and set to "Documentation".  We
> can probably all agree on the keys Name, Comment, Icon, DocPath, and
> Lang.  I think we should have a ContentType key, which would give the
> MIME type of the referenced documentation.

Agreed.

> I've said a few times that I'd like to work with something like the menu
> spec, so of course I'd like Categories, OnlyShowIn, and NotShowIn, as in
>
> http://freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec/0.8/ar01s03.html

Ok.

> And, of course, we need something like Identifier, what KDE currently
> uses X-DOC-Identifier for.  I rather like the identifier scheme that I
> outlined earlier:
>
> https://listman.redhat.com/archives/xdg-list/2003-December/msg00160.html
>
> As a recap, identifiers would use a slash-separated string as a simple
> namespacing mechanism.  Every identifier is under one of a couple of
> standard top-level namespaces.  Additional namespaces can be introduced
> below that.

Sounds good.

> I would like a Replaces key in the metadata that gives a list of IDs of
> documents that this document replaces.

Yes, that might be useful.

> If we can get some agreement on the basics, I can start to write up a
> specification for this.  It'll need a place to live on the web, of
> course.

As we seem to agree on the basics it would be really great if you would come 
up with an initial draft for a specification. I think the most logical would 
be to host it on freedesktop.org as "Documentation Meta Information" 
specification or something like that.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>