8 Sep
2015
8 Sep
'15
1:06 a.m.
On 09/07/2015 05:50 PM, Mark Benson wrote:
This probably sounds ludicrous and over-ambitious but
would it make
sense to compile the information into a database then run various
scripts to compile files of various formats from it?
Just the way my mind works :)
Are you kidding?? This is a phenomenally great idea!
About 12-13 years ago I worked on a project building a commercial
product. I was doing the hardware and firmware, but I was able to steer
the documentation team a bit. We ended up writing all of the
documentation source material in XML, and we had some XSLT scripts to
generate printed manuals, the help files for the application, and the
online documentation on the website. It was all driven from the XML
source documents, so it never got out of sync. It was great.
Sure, I really dislike XML, it's way too friggin' verbose and
overcomplicated for what it is, but it has some pretty significant
advantages: It's well understood, it's standardized, it's documented,
and there are scads of tools out there to manipulate it.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA