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On 4 April 2010 21:33, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@g.o> wrote: |
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> Having to write a custom stylesheet just to get one wiki page to do what you want is pretty dumb. |
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Yes it would be. The idea is that you design consistent styling from |
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the get-go, so your stylesheets will be ready for those needs. Pretty |
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much the same as the current documentation solution. |
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> How is it unfair? Because tables really are so much simpler to write in GuideXML? |
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No, because they were displaying different things, using different features. |
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> Here's a more complicated table: |
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> |
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> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect10 |
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> source: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml?passthru=1 |
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|
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And you think that's intuitive? Tables are a bitch, and I think both |
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the GuideXML approach (copied from HTML) and the wiki syntax one are |
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equally unintuitive. In my opinion reStructuredText is offering a |
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better alternative: |
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http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#tables |
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> Mediawiki mostly involves memorizing how many quote or tick marks you use. |
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The beauty is: you don't have to memorize it, as it is just a click of |
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a button on the editor interface away. |
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> This markup is *completely nonsemantic*. In GuideXML, you know EXACTLY what each tag means. |
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No, I don't. The body and title tags are used quite differently from |
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HTML, which is confusing. When do I use section and when do I use |
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body? And what the frak is stmt? And why uri and figure instead of |
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HTML's a and img tags? Except to a few dedicated people, GuideXML is |
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confusing. |
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> At any time, you can throw in HTML and CSS to do stuff, because apparently Mediawiki isn't flexible enough on its own to generate your desired rendering. |
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Rather, it's so flexible that it even accomodates using HTML and CSS |
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should you wish so. But you don't have to. |
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> Having to mix HTML with a totally different wiki syntax is stupid. |
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Having to mix HTML with a different dialect of XML is equally stupid, |
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and moreover it is confusing. At least with MediaWiki, you don't have |
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to use it, as there are other options. |
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> Having to learn CSS *on top* of learning wiki syntax (and HTML) just to write a document is retarded. |
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Wiki editors will not have to learn CSS, unless you have very specific |
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needs that are unforeseen by the designers of the stylesheets you use. |
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> You've tried to make the case that learning GuideXML is too hard, but in order to use Mediawiki you'd need to learn at least 3 languages. |
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You don't need to at all. Depending on how the maintainer configures |
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things, at most one markup language should be enough. And that is |
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greatly helped by the editor UI. So for most simple edits you don't |
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need to learn any markup language at all. |
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> [...] Leave the styling to a separate stylesheet, and let the code just be code. |
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Yes, that's the whole idea. It's just that MediaWiki offers the |
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flexibility to use those extra features, but you don't have to use |
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them. |
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> But that's at the price of standardization: since arbitrary tags and markup is allowed, there's nothing to keep consistency between documents, or even within the same document. |
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That's a matter of configuration. I'm all for locking that down and |
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use a consistent standard styling, so only relatively simple markup is |
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needed. (But we'd have the flexibility to do something more complex |
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should we wish to configure things so.) |
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> GuideXML at least has a clean, consistent visual representation. Once you start allowing arbitrary markup, there'll be a million and one ways of representing the same thing, and that's not good for someone trying to wade through documents. There *should* be a standard way of representing information. |
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I absolutely agree. And you can achieve the same with a wiki. |
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>> And if you really wanted to, you could easily write an extension to |
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>> parse GuideXML, so it could be used as wiki markup. So again, the |
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>> markup is not really an argument against using a wiki instead of our |
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>> current GuideXML+gorg setup. |
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> |
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> Except I haven't seen Mediawiki offer anything like our textual color palette or other code syntax and block-level formatting flexibility. |
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What do you mean? You can predefine styles in your CSS to express your |
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"textual color palette" (if I understand correctly what you meant by |
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that). There is advanced code syntax highlighting available, for |
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example using GeSHi. |
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>> 2. It is a non-transferable skill. You can't use it anywhere else. |
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>> And unless you are a regular GuideXML writer, you will have to |
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>> look up its particular usage almost every time you do use it. |
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> |
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> It's just XML. That's all. If you can write HTML, then you can write XML. XML is *easier*. It's got far fewer tags, for starters. That means much, much less to learn. |
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That's not fully correct. XML has in principle a practically infinite |
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number of tags. It all depends on which "dialect" you use. If it is a |
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dialect you do not use a lot, you will forget the usage of particular |
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tags. |
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> Oh, and guess what? You ebuild writers are already using XML every single time you make changes to ebuilds: metadata.xml, etc. |
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Yes, and I find that often I have to look up the specific usage of |
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anything beyond the standard minimal set of tags. |
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> Most of us have used GuideXML at some point or another in our /proj/ webpages and devspaces, if not in /doc/en/. Guess what? That's the same XML, and there's much, much more content constantly written for /proj/ and dev.g.o than for /doc/. So don't try to tell me that people don't have at least passing familiarity with it. |
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That's not the point. The problem is that most of us don't use it |
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often enough to be sufficiently fluent in it, and you will never use |
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it for anything else but gentoo.org pages. Moreover, there is no web |
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UI for quick edits, with helpful buttons and hints... |
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|
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-- |
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Ben de Groot |
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Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer |