reference manual need

Noel J. Bergman noel at devtech.com
Mon May 21 00:39:46 UTC 2001


> how do you envision the encyclopedia being "easily modifiable"
> would we make updates directly to the web content ...

I am guessing that Rosemary's thinking is to encode the encyclopedia in XML.
That being done, she can regenerate XML from updated images, and merge her
annotated XML with the newly generated XML. Part of this process can include
the automatic flagging for her attention of all XML tags that are new or
changed, for additional annotation/revision.

Once the encyclopedia is XML encoded, multiple presentation formats are
easily produced.  When I write tutorials for IBM, I XML encode them
according to their DTD, and their tool produces several different outputs
(HTML, PDF, etc.).

Rosemary could consider making the XML source editable on the web. I do have
concerns about allowing non-cognoscenti to edit public XML documents,
especially without a DTD validating editor; that might introduce more work
for Rosemary than it saves. In many cases, I suspect that people would be
better suited by adding better comments to the Squeak code, which would be
picked up by her (semi)-automating processing.

	--- Noel





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