Re: [Firebird-docs] Interbase 6.0 reflanguage in html/xml format

[Helen B. <he...@ii...>]

At 06:57 AM 8/05/2010, GR wrote:
>Hi
>
>Sorry, Marius, but i think, that we must fully _rewrite_
>langref (and not only langref), not simple transform it.
>There are too many reasons for it...

In fact, I have the Framemaker 6 sources for the IB 6 docs that were corrected and updated by pre-Firebird open source community members (most notably by Claudio Valderrama, to a lesser extent by Ann Harrison and me) back in 2000.  I have commercial tools that can export FM source to DocBook source, although I'm using them primarily to convert from FM, Word and various other formats to DITA, in a complex project related to my work for IBPhoenix Publications.  

The point I make is that it's not the access to the source materials that is the inhibitor to recycling the Borland stuff.  It is that Inprise, later Borland, now Embarcadero, have been unwilling to open the doc sources.  The commercial arguments against that ever coming about are obvious. 

Since acquiring the content using any PDF-to-something tool violates the licensing terms regarding decompilation of Embarcadero assets, the wide availability of such tools doesn't help us. Now, as then, there is no choice but to rewrite from scratch.  

But, even if the source were available to us, it is not mainly the need to rewrite that inhibits the progress of Firebird documentation, but the lack of [re]writers willing to develop content.  We delude ourselves to claim otherwise.

IMO, the standard set by Paul V in the LangRef updates makes the fresh Firebird langref stuff more user-friendly than the Borland predecessors, anyway.

Incidentally, the format of the on-line language resources published by the DITA community for DITA (sourced in DITA, natch!) seem to me to be a lot more user-friendly than B-N diagrams.  For a sample (DITA 1.1 spec, not the more recent 1.2) see http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/OS/langspec/ditaref-type.html#refsyn and scroll down to the Table of Contents...

Helen