Re: geekness

[Gary Preckshot <garrell@inreach.com>]

Guylhem Aznar wrote:

>Everytime I hear people complaining of the "geekness" of LDP documents, I
ask myself a question : what can we do?

You can review the modification I'm making of the HOWTO HOWTO and provide input.
I'm a newbie and a professional technical author, and I took on the HOWTO HOWTO
both to learn DocBook and to learn how to be an LDP author. It has the quality of
"geekness" in spades. You'll see what I mean when you read the modified version.
So how do I put it up for comment? I don't have a web site of my own, and I need
some place to upload it. That's one of the geeky things you do - ask for authors
to request comments and never supply a way to do it.

>You need a technical background to write documentation, and we can't
afford translators.

Just because you have a technical background doesn't mean you can't write well.

>Maybe should we ask newbies a hand to translate our documents to common
english?

I'm going to give you a bigger hand: an outline of how to write. You're far too
focused on the mechanics of SGML to the extent that you concentrate on "coding"
rather than what your readers need. Typical geekness. I'll leave you with two
quotes:

"Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them,
    Into the jaws of death,
    Into the mouth of Hell
        Rode the six hundred."
                    Alfred Lord Tennyson

That's what I think of writing SGML manually. Vainglory.

"Don't die for your country. Make the other guy die for his country."
                                                                George S. Patton

Why I think LDP needs to address SGML editors more directly. Practicality.

Gary



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