Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> And most documentation systems are far easier adopted by people other than engineers.

Whew, gonna have to have a hard disagree with you there. DaC is several times - nay, orders of magnitude - less complicated than standing up a S1000D, a DITA, or even a DocBook publishing system. For anyone.

Count the layers of configuration.

S1000D, you have to worry about issue (which has zero compatibility, and the Technical Steering says they have zero intention of releasing any guide to matching the different issues up), you have to worry about BREX, then you have to worry about bespoke DMC schemes, and then you have all the many ways the PDF or IETM build can get built out to Custom Solution X, since the TS/SGs offer absolutely bupkiss for guidance in that department (it's a publication specification that doesn't specify the publication, what can I say?). The DITA side's not a lot better: you have multiple DITA schemas, DTD customization, specialization, and you have a very very very diverse batch of DITA-OT versions to pick from, then on top of that you have the wide wide world of XSL interpreters, again with very little interplay. DocBook is probably the sanest of the bunch, here, but we're still going to be wrestling with external entities, profiles, XSL, and whether we're doing 4.X or 5 or whatever is in DBNG.

Not to mention all of this stuff costs money. Sometimes a whole lot of it. Last time I shopped round, just the reviewer per seat licenses for the S1000D system were 13k per seat per year, the writer seats were over 50k per year.

DaC, on the other hand, I want to get re-use and conditionals, so I get Visual Studio Code. I get Asciidoc. I get some extensions. I get gitlab, set up whatever actions I want to use, set up the build machine if I want one, and if I'm feeling adventurous, Antora. I'm literally writing an hour later. I'll probably spend more time explaining to the reviewers what a Pull Request is.



You might be interested in this project I came across a few months ago. This person is trying to build a S1000D style system based on Asciidoc.

https://github.com/lopsotronic/Ascii1000D




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: