#3 Find better documentation format

[Hanno Braun]

All documentation is currently organized in plain-text files. While this is enough for many purposes, it would be nice to have a more advanced format that fulfills the following requirements:
* Line-based, human-readable file format that can be edited with a standard text editor.
* Ability to create links between different documents.
* Only logical information embedded in the document, no information about how the final document should look.
* Ability to generate several document types (html, pdf, etc.) by using some kind of style sheet file (e.g. css).

A possible candidate would be DocBook[1].

[1] http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

[Hanno Braun]

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Another good candidate seems to be DITA[1].

[1] DITA Open Toolkit: http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/

[Hanno Braun]

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First research indicates that DITA, as a format, seems to be better suited than DocBook:
* DITA is based on topics that can be assembled into documents, while DocBook is much more monolitic (better suited for books and articles).
* DITA is less complicated then DocBook, which has a huger number of tags and seems to be quite bloated.

However, DocBook's tool support is vastly better. For DITA, only one open source solution seems to exist (DITA Open Toolkit[1]) which is cumbersome to install (I couldn't get it to work so far, clearly more effort is required for this than I'd like to put in), while DocBook is supported by a broad range of tools and can be easily transformed into any output format.

As it looks right now, DocBook seems to be the better solution.