Docbook and other doc formats

[Rich Bowen <rb...@rcbowen.com>]

Long, long ago, we did the arduous conversion from HTML to XML for our 
documentation format, and the benefit was enormous and immediate - well 
worth the effort.

Now, ten years later (at least) Docbook/XML is no longer quite as 
popular as it once was, and I wonder to what extent it is stifling 
contribution to the documentation process - in particular, translation. 
At the moment we have *one* translation (French) which is maintained, 
and everything else is woefully behind. See 
http://people.apache.org/~takashi/translation-status/test.html#trunk I 
wonder if it's because the initial setup to translate a document is just 
so big.

And so I was wondering, if the time has come to consider moving to 
another format, or, perhaps inserting another format into the existing 
toolchain. eg., using Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) or 
similar to go Markdown -> Docbook and then from there use our current 
toolchain. Or possibly convert entirely to Markdown (or asciidoc - 
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ or rst - 
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html) and build a new conversion chain.

While the initial effort to make this move would be substantial, I feel 
that the benefits would be enormous in terms of getting new 
contributors, and new translators, for the documentation effort.

Thoughts?

-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen@rcbowen.com - @rbowen
http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon


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