On 2014-10-08 at 10:49:33 +0200, Jan Stolarek wrote:
Therefore I'd like to hear your opinion on migrating away from the current Docbook XML markup to some other similarly expressive but yet more lightweight markup documentation system such as Asciidoc[1] or ReST/Sphinx[2].
My opinion is that I don't really care. I only edit the User Guide once every couple of months or so. I don't have problems with Docbook but if others want something else I can adjust.
I'd argue, that casual contributions may benefit significantly from switching to a more human-friendly markup, as my theory is that it's much easier to pick-up a syntax that's much closer to plain-text rather than a fully-fledged Docbook XML. With a closer-to-plain-text syntax you can more easily focus on the content you want to write rather than being distracted by the incidental complexity of writing low-level XML markup. Or put differently, I believe or rather hope this may lower the barrier-to-entry for casual User's Guide contributions. Fwiw, I stumbled over the slide-deck (obviously dogfooded in Asciidoc) http://mojavelinux.github.io/decks/discover-zen-writing-asciidoc/cojugs20130... which tries to make the point that Asciidoc helps you focus more on writing content rather than fighting with the markup, including a comparision of the conciseness of a chosen example of Asciidoc vs. the resulting Docbook XML it is converted into. Cheers, hvr