simplifying <articleinfo> and <bookinfo> sections

[Jeff Schering]

On 12/3/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
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> While playing around in the topic-based-help branch, I thought that if
> we're going to have a lot of different documents, it would be convenient
> to have a simpler more automated way of writing <articleinfo> and
> <bookinfo> sections.
>
> Instead of writing them for each document, we can simply call entities
> which bring up the same thing each time. See how it works here:
>
> https://docteam.ubuntu.com/repos/branches/topic-based-help/ubuntu/C/add-applications/add-applications.xml
>

Yes, good idea, and it seems to work well.

> What do people think about standardising these sections for *all* of our
> documents in this way? We could have a standard list of contributors for
> all documents (common/C/contributors.xml) which is called for all the
> documents. The disadvantage is that the reader doesn't get to see who
> works on each individual document, but the advantage is its simpler to
> implement documents and that everyone is credited for their contribution
> to {*}Ubuntu documentation, regardless of where they contributed.
>

How about simply listing the Ubuntu Documentation Team as the author?
This won't be much different than the way it is on the wiki, for
example, where author's names get obscured all the time, even when a
tiny typo is corrected.

Also, if you view the above example (add-applications.xml) in Yelp,
the only way to get to the list of authors (once it's added) is by the
menu item File->About This Document, so the authors are well hidden
anyway.

If we want to keep track of who worked on what, either for ourselves
or for readers, then it would probably be just as easy to maintain a
wiki page that had that information, and much more visible too.

Since we already have the docteam as the copyright holder, why not use
it as the author too?

Cheers,
Jeff

-- 
Jeff Schering
GPG: F23C67E8