DOCBOOK: Re: Modular Documentation

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Ed Manley <edmanley@bellsouth.net> was heard to say:
| I ordered Norman Walsh's DocBook publication off of Amazon, but it won't be
| here for a few days, then I found this discussion list.

http://docbook.org/tdg/en for starters :-)

| How can a company, no, how can I in particular, being completely naive to
| XML, best get started learning and implementing modular documentation in a
| small company? I have looked at the DocBooks website, and considered trying

You face a number of challenges, some technical some non-technical. On
the whole, the non-technical challenges (teaching your authors to do
this "structured authoring" thing in a new tool) are much harder
(honest!).

As far as the technical challenges go, one of the things you need to
decide early on is what granularity if reuse you're interested in.
Trying to reuse chapters or sections in different manuals is a much
different problem than trying to reuse paragraphs.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | People often say that this or that
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | person has not yet found himself.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | But the self is not something one
                                   | finds, it is something one
                                   | creates.--Thomas Szasz