[gentoo-dev] {Guide,Project,Foo}XML too confusing for many devs?

[Alec Warner]

First off, this is not a discussion on why XML sucks, or why we shouldn't
be using XML or anything like that.  This is not a discussion about what
we should be using instead of XML.  This is a discussion about using XML
for our webpages.

Many projects have old and nasty webpages.  This has been a problem within
gentoo since before I arrived and probably has been a problem since we
started having webpages.  One of the issues I wish to address is whether
or not writing webpages in XML (Guide or Project or something_else) is
just too much of a barrier for many people.  I've personally always been
pretty much a 'copy something that works and edit the bits I need' kind of
a guy.  There is certainly a large body of work to steal^H^H^H^H^Hcopy
from.  However when something you are working on doesn't fit inside of
something that has already been done it becomes very difficult to make it
'fit' into our existing XML structure.

This forces you to either ask for help from the masters of GuideXML (aka
the Docs team) or try and figure out how the hell to write the xsl and
dtd's yourself, or give up.  Personally I think most people end up at the
latter case (the giving up one).  I know developers that won't even touch
any webpages at all; I can only assume that they just hate XML long time
and find the whole issue of writing pages complicated and burdoning.

So this is getting pretty long winded; my basic question is do you as a
developer find writing web pages to be confusing or difficult?  Is there
not a good tutorial for learning our webpage XML syntax?  Do you find that
you bump up against restrictions in the DTD or other problems that prevent
you from expressing yourself properly?  Do you have any idea how to
actually go about extending GuideXML (or the other XML's we provide)  Have
you ever tried?  Could we improve training with regards to any of this?

Thanks,

-Alec

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