[pmwiki-users] Concept, Task and Reference

[Bellave Jayaram]

Sorry, forgot to hit reply-all. Jayaram

-----Original Message-----
From: Bellave Jayaram [mailto:bellavejayaram at cox.net] 
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 8:32 AM
To: 'Patrick R. Michaud'
Subject: RE: [pmwiki-users] Concept, Task and Reference

DITA is XML based and contains its own jargon which the average author would
not be interested in learning. However, because PmWiki supports many things
which come close to how DITA works, it is possible to apply some of DITAs
strengths for any documentation, especially if it can be organized in a
topic oriented way. What we might end up with ultimately is a poor man's
version of a collaborative DITA-like editor and CMS without actually having
to learn and purchase an expensive XML Editor and XML repository that
supports DITA.

Yes, I was concerned about duplicate information in many pages and yes, I
think a PmWiki-DITA group which is not included in default searches will
work. 

Jayaram

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick R. Michaud [mailto:pmichaud at pobox.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 6:49 AM
To: Bellave Jayaram
Cc: pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
Subject: Re: [pmwiki-users] Concept, Task and Reference

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 01:25:21AM -0700, Bellave Jayaram wrote:
>    [...]  Although I don't yet have a gentle introduction to
>    DITA for PmWiki authors, I will try to explain things as I go along.
>    [...]
>    Programmers are used to this sort of chunking but it is not always
>    intuitive to non-programmers. Anyway, the idea is `define once, use
>    multiple times'.
> 
>    I won't get into specialization just yet but there are several
advantages
>    to this type of organization. By adding audience markup and by creating
>    trails (see my page Profiles.BJayaram for what I am thinking), we can
>    create useful "lessons" for various tasks for readers, authors and
admins.
> 
>    I welcome everyone's feedback on this.

I think it's useful, but given that DITA apparently needs a 
"gentle introduction" and that it's "not always intuitive to
non-programmers", I don't think it would be an appropriate model
for the PmWiki documentation.  The PmWiki documentation *must* be
accessible and understandable (in an authoring sense) by the average
author.

However, I don't want to kill the effort, because I am interested
to see how it would end up.  Instead of doing things in the PmWiki
group, how about creating a "PmWiki-DITA" group on pmwiki.org and 
organizing things there?  I can set up pmwiki.org's default
searches to avoid the PmWiki-DITA group (so that we don't end up
sending searchers to duplicates of the documentation).

Pm