Docs Meeting 2009-06-18 Summary

Karen Schneider kgs at esilibrary.com
Thu Jun 18 14:36:10 UTC 2009


> * We had a request to join a "shared open-source style guide" group.  I
> think this request left us all scratching our heads a bit.  Sparks will
> be following up on this request to determine what exactly the request is
> for.



This agenda item actually why I (kgs) was on IRC at 8 p.m. last night
instead of chillin' out with a homebrew in front of the idiot box, so I'll
toss in my thoughts: coming from a brand-new documentation project (for
Evergreen open source library software), how to structure a styleguide and
what it should contain are really key questions. I have some sample guides,
though they are from companies that shared them with me one-on-one so I
can't really post them.

A generic styleguide could be very helpful. There is a tendency among people
new to documentation to want to focus on "style" versus structure and
semantic markup, which is really important to address, and then for a
project new to DocBook, identifying a tag subset congruent with a
distributed volunteer corps of XML n00bs (me included) is also important.

Having looked at the guide close-up last night, I must say it's helpful in a
broad, generic sense, but it needs a lot of fill-in-the-blank to become more
useful. It would probably be more helpful to our project to continue to look
at other style guides (such as, but certainly not limited to Fedora's) and
mix and match as is appropriate.

-- 
-- 
| Karen G. Schneider
| Community Librarian
| Equinox Software Inc. "The Evergreen Experts"
| Toll-free: 1.877.Open.ILS (1.877.673.6457) x712
| kgs at esilibrary.com
| Web: http://www.esilibrary.com
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