[ntp:hackers] Driver interface change

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Tue Nov 30 12:30:44 PST 2004


Paul,

I'm not going to discuss this. Everything I can say has been said in 
previous messages. My web, which includes personal vitae, course 
support, publications, projects, including NTP, now runs several hundred 
pages and 800 megabytes. I care less about high-level languages than I 
do about overall web management, for which I have tools. So, what you 
get from me is HTML compatible with those tools and no excuses.

Dave

Paul Vixie wrote:

>dave, you wrote in mail to harlan that...
>
>  
>
>>Rendering my html pages on program documentation in any other form is
>>a waste of effort. If you do that, you will need to include a
>>disclaimer that the original html pages are the definitive source and
>>that the html pages can and do change from time to time. There are
>>lots of things that need doing with higher priority than that. I have
>>no problem with user's guides, howtos, etc., but the definitive
>>documents on the commands and options are on the html pages.
>>    
>>
>
>i think this is wrongheaded.  if you want to edit in a high level language
>then you can use docbook or rfc2629/xml2rfc, which can then be rendeded
>into ascii, manpage, and html according to the needs of the readers.  you
>can even use a WYSIWYG editor for these xml-derived HLL's.
>
>html is not an HLL, and it is often impossible to render for all readers.
>by not being an HLL it is subject to all kinds of stylistic "gotchas" such
>that only the original author can reliably and cleanly make changes to it;
>by not being able to render into manpage-space or ASCII-space you limit
>your readership (or you place a burden on motivated readers).
>
>so while i agree with you that there should be one master copy of the docs,
>and also that the master copy should not be a flat ASCII file, i cannot
>agree with your selection of html as a documentation source language.  can
>we all just work together on choosing a common doc-src-lang that will answer
>your needs and also harlan's needs and my needs and the opensource/unix/linux
>community's needs and "hackers"' needs?  i am sure that one exists, and i
>am also sure that html is not "it."
>
>paul
>  
>




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