On the selection of a markup language

["Mr. Peter Davis" <peter.davis@neustar.biz>]

Latex, to me, has always been the clear winner. There are conversions to almost any format, it supports macros for repeating tasks, etc... everything else, IMV, is just over simplifications that remove capabilities and flexibility.

=peterd



On the spec format, DITA is in my opinion the technical winner...but didn't get adopted in the TC so we need something people are more familiar with.  XHTML is a possibility, but I'd caution against using XHTML as HTML (in other words writing XHTML but publishing as a non-XHTML mime type).  That was a big trend when XHTML was on the rise, as a way of getting around the strictness of XHTML syntax, but it means the browser is basically just treating it as a flavor of HTML. I'd actually recommend MarkDown instead, for the following reasons: (1) Github supports MarkDown rendering out of the box if the file has the suffix MD; (2) Github supports MarkDown editing on the site now; (3) MarkDown, while inferior to DITA from a full-kit publishing perspective, still is an intermediate format that can be rendered to HTML5 or PDF, and probably does cover 80% or so of markup needs.  I do think using Github is a clear win.