GNOME doc happenings

[Jim Campbell]

Hi All,

A lot of doc-ground got covered at a recent Writing Open Source
conference in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. A lot of doc-ground got
covered at a recent Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound,
Ontario, Canada.  I won't attempt to cover everything here, but would
like to at least point the group to the GNOME doc mailing list [0],
and to the blogs of Shaun McCance [1], and Paul Cutler [2].  They seem
to be covering a lot of ground here in a short period of time, so I
didn't want our team to miss out on what was being covered.

A few items of note:
- Both myself, Phil Bull, and Milo Casagrande were in attendance from
the Ubuntu-doc team
- Shaun McCance has developed a new xml-based doc syntax called
Mallard. It has both an easier syntax than docbook, and offers up some
interesting features that are not present in docbook.  Mallard docs
are currently able to be displayed in current builds of Yelp* & the
GNOME doc team has already built sample documentation for Empathy
using Mallard.
- Unrelated to the conference activities, the Serna free XML Editor is
being released in an Open Source license [4] (exact license unknown).
I am hopeful that the license will be one that will allow
redistribution via our repos. If that's the case, then docbook (or
DITA) docs could be written in by contributors through a desktop
WYSIWYG interface, making doc contributions much easier for new
contributors.

Jim

[0] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2009-June/thread.html
[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/shaunm/
[2] http://www.silwenae.org/blog/
[3] http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/mallard/spec.html
[4] http://forum.syntext.com/syntext-serna-xml-editor/serna-open-source-discussion/226-serna-free-xml-editor-goes-open-source-soon-help-us-build-community.html

* Mallard-based docs can also be output to HTML.