Re: publication infrastructure / respec

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 5:51 AM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
> So, I think the real questions are:
>
> 1.  Version control: CVS, Mercurial, or Wiki?

+1 Mercurial

Offline DCVS far preferred to just about anything else.

-1 CVS

Deep painful memories involving tags and branches, the scars haven't
really healed.

-0.5 Mediawiki

Conflicting edits are really annoying to resolve, and tend to mean
just dropping the edit completely and starting the changes over. The
lack of any offline capability is also frustrating at times.

>
> 2.  Authoring format: Mediawiki markup, or HTML5-with-<sections>.  This
> includes how the bibliography is done.

Attached is a 20 minute job of turning Turtle into Respec HTML5 while
learning how Respec works, just did the introduction and first
section. It's reasonably easy to edit, and produces good output
without any real tooling work at all. From the attachement it's clear
that someone editing or reading doesn't need anything other then a
text editor and the document being edited.

The issue for Turtle with both Mediawiki and Respec will the EBNF
sections. I hope there exists some tool for producing HTML from
something simpler. Perhaps Eric knows and can mention whatever tool is
currently used for that or if it's done by hand? (shudder) If there is
a tool then the respec import method would work to include the output
of the tool and leave the rest of the editing in the HTML.

 Having played with both for an hour or two the process of directly
editing the HTML seems far simpler and less suprising then trying to
make Mediawiki do what I mean. On other issue from the error messages
in the Respec output there are going to be somethings to add to it's
bibliography library as well.

Cheers,
Gavin