[Haskell] Making Haskell more open

Axel Simon A.Simon at kent.ac.uk
Sun Nov 13 13:11:05 EST 2005


On Sun, 2005-11-13 at 18:18 +0100, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Freitag, 11. November 2005 20:08 schrieb John Velman:
> > I agree with Gour.  I found txt2tags as a result of a discussion on the
> > GTK2HS list.  It is simple to use, readable as is, or easily transformable
> > to a variety of targets.  Also, it is consistent with bird-track literate
> > Haskell, so I can run my .lhs documents through txt2tags and get html,
> > latex, pretty text, or a bunch of things I haven't tried yet including
> > *.doc (msword) (the latter via txt2tags for html, soffice to go from html
> > to *.doc).
> 
> The most important question is: Does txt2tags use logical markup?

No, it is very layout driven. The advantage is that its dead simple. To
be honest we (the Gtk2Hs people) haven't started on our tutorial yet, so
we don't have any experience with txt2tags yet.

If you think that logical markup is important, then I'd like to point
out that DocBook gives you some structure, but you still put in some
meaning on top of that, i.e. DocBook has extensive markup for specifying
C function signatures, but you'd have to extend it to give you anything
that goes beyond pure layout information for things like Haskell
functions or code snippets.

I think the right thing is to keep ghc's manual in DocBook. What people
add will not be whole chapters, but rather paragraphs. The markup you
need to learn for that can easily be gleamed from the surrounding text.

Axel.



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