Developers of Sympa

[Colas Nahaboo <address@concealed>]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:30:54 -0400 (EDT)
address@concealed wrote:
>       To me, making the documentation available as hyper-linked web
>       pages is a given in terms of a requirement, and documentation
>       platform like DocBook would give that to you.

This is not the point. The point of a web-based system is the ease to
collabrate in producing the actual *contents*, by as many hands as possible

>       The problem I see with a web centric approach is that, at
>       least from what I've seen so far, you can't generate really
>       good paginated printed documentation. 

Who cares? sympa is a network application. If you use sympa, you have a
network. When I have a problem with sympa, I just google it, thus I would be
much more likely to find it on a public web site than on a paper sheet :-)

>       It is certainly a possible model for collaboration.  But
>       would this mean that documentation would need to be created
>       and maintained using the text editor embedded in your web
>       browser?  Web page text boxes always make me quickly long
>       for a real editor.

Try it. You will be surprised at the efficiency of it. Moreover people then
become focused on contents, not style, as you cannot toy with the styling
issues. (We have a 30.000 pages wiki in our corporate intranet for instance)

Note that the sympa doc is already (in part) maintained this way (text boxes
on the web)... the Sympa FAQ.

PS: On the localisation issues, maintaining many versions of the same doc in
many languages, you may want to read the paper: 

Translation the Wiki Way
http://ws2006.wikisym.org/space/Paper%3e%3eTranslation+the+Wiki+Way
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p19.pdf

So, I really advise the sympa team to reconsider the matter and look at pure,
web-native, easily editable, documentation.

-- 
Colas Nahaboo, Webcore, ILOG Sophia Antipolis, http://colas.nahaboo.net