Message-Id: <199708051907.VAA01015@en1.engelschall.com>
Subject: Re: Apache Documentation Project !!
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970805000342.6476A-100000@veal.organic.com> from
 Alexei Kosut at "Aug 5, 97 00:06:08 am"
To: new-httpd@apache.org (Apache Developer ML)
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 1997 21:07:28 +0200
From: rse@engelschall.com (Ralf S. Engelschall)
Organization: Engelschall, Germany.
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Hello Alexei Kosut, in a previous mail you wrote:

> > Really cool would be to have the doc's in PDF format ! I like pdf because
> > it's easy 
> > to manouvre around the doc, and the print-out is book quality.
> > Html is nice for an online ref. doc, but not for something to read a lot.
> > Pdf is a BMW 8 series compared with Html which is merely a Geo Metro when
> > it
> > comes to doc's.
> 
> But HTML has one great advantage; it's portable, it's well-known, and
> it's easy to edit for everyone. The original docs were written in SGML,
> and David Robinson translated them to HTML and PostScript. But we dropped
> the SGML version about ten minutes after he wrote them, because no one
> wanted to maintain them. We're all web folk, we can all do HTML.
> 
> If people want to run the HTML files through a HTML-to-PostScript or
> HTML-to-PDF or HTML-to-AmigaWord 0.7 converter, that's fine with me, but
> I think we should definitedly keep the source docs in HTML.

SGML is not nice when one uses all its features, but the handbook I started
uses the LinuxDoc-DTD and the used commands/tags are just a few and they are
very similar to HTML.  So when a HTML-hacker says he is unable to use this
SGML dialect he actually just don't want to use it. The language is easy.  And
the advantage: There are only tags left for structuring, because all other
HTML stuff is _generated_.

Greetings,
                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       rse@engelschall.com
                                       www.engelschall.com