Otaku, Cedric's weblog

Structured text (a la wiki) is my favorite writing format: you can use any tool to write, manage your content with powerful tools (CVS, etc) and yet put the structural markup (not formatting) in while writing.

IMHO the small number of wiki codes needed for article or book writing don't get in the way too much, I find it to be a good compromise between "kilometer writing" and the hassle of typing in a wysiwyg thing.

Cedric, I think though your argument is valid and it's something most of us learn the hard way, DocBook documents don't really fall into this category.
Writing in DocBook helps with logical layout, there's not much formatting to do, or at least that I know of.
You have your code, quote, em and a couple of other tags and that's about it, the rest is all about sections, sub-sections and friends, and lists, tables, figures.
You really don't get to waste much time on things like formatting; you can't slip into pointless tasks very easily.

Cheers

PS: why is the email address required ? With so much spam around, I'm hesitant to place it on public pages.

Thanks for the tips, Cedric. This is exactly what I'm doing with the current chatper - writing it in VIM without any formatting whatsoever. I'll style it later when I'm finished to get it ready for the editing cycles. I still wish that once I took the content into Word that there was a way to go back to XML for full round trip editing (XML->Word->XML) without losing the styles.

On a side note, Jason van Zyl contacted me about this topic as well and we discussed it a bit. Please see my latest blog entry on this saga.

Hey your blogging software doesn't like the word b-e-a-s-t :-) :-) LOL :-)

I gave in and just use the b-e-a-s-t Word. You can roundtrip the XML if you are

a) Are dedicated
b) Have far too much time on your hands
c) Slightly warped

Ultimately WordML preserves enough information that it can pass through a stylesheet back to sensible XMl and vice versa. It's really not hard. I've done it one direction and can see it's not too hard the other. However my editor would have my dangly bits for breakfast if I waste anymore time doing this sort of thing :-)

So I use the b-e-a-s-t instead :-)

Good luck!

Cederic,
I like your notion of "kilometer writing". This is definitively the right thing to do. But it is also a good idea to directly put some markup while you type, as it gets harder to remember what is what when the text is completely unstructured.

Heiko

I think this could also apply to writing code.