[PLUG] PLUG FAQ ?

[Paul Heinlein]

On Sun, 28 Apr 2002, Terry Griffin wrote:

> > Anyone working on one?  I just this second started re: dsl
> > providers, isps. Don't want to duplicate effort, but if there's no
> > maintainer-in-hiding, I'm up.
> >
> > Soliciting subjects.  Will search the archives for "should be in faq"...
> 
> Paul Heinlein wrote something up a year or two ago. I think it was part
> of the automated introduction when you subscribed on the old list server.
> Maybe it's still archived somewhere.

I remember writing the info file for majordomo back when Sean Utt was 
hosting the list. Past that, I don't remember writing a FAQ ... though 
anything's possible :-)

I'm in this XML/XSLT mode lately, so I'll pitch in my $0.02: have 
submissions in XML format. Make a simple plug-faq DTD (so pgsml mode 
in emacs can do auto-completion and validation :-) and have all 
entries in that format, e.g.,

<plug-faq>
  <qa>
    <question>What's the best *nix tex editor?</question>
    <updated>2002-04-28</updated>
    <maintainer>
      <firstname>Brave</firstname>
      <surname>Soul</surname>
      <email>agnostic at isp.net</email>
    </maintainer>
    <contributors>
      <contributor>
        <firstname>Emacs</firstname>
        <surname>Fan</surname>
        <email>efan at gnu.org</email>
      </contributor>
      <contributor>
        <firstname>vi</firstname>
        <surname>Bigot</surname>
        <email>vib at vim.org</email>
      </contributor>
    </contributors>
    <answer>
      <para>This question could also be asked as, "Besides asking
      about which Linux distribution is best, what's the best way
      to get PLUG off-track?"</para>
      <para>Seriously, regardless of your ultimate preference, it's
      good to know your way around both <command>vi</command> and
      <command>emacs</command>, as both will be on just about any
      Linux or *BSD you're likely to encounter.</para>
      ...
    </answer>
  </qa>
</plug-faq>

My hunch is that a fairly small subset of the DocBook tagset would 
suffice for all of the formatting we'd in the <answer> section.

Formatting the various .xml files could be handled with a small XSL
stylesheet and a decent XSLT app like Sablotron or Xalan.

The nice thing about handling it this way is that the output fomrat is 
completely divorced from the source document. There could be one 
stylesheet for HTML output, one for text output (suitable for e-mail), 
and perhaps one for PDF (in case someone wanted to print it).

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com>