Hi,
I was interested to hear yesterday that there were discussions about
abandoning XHP as the file format for the help files, and use plain HTML
instead.
I am (so far) convinced that the actual format is not the real problem
here, and that with a bit of a cleanup, XHP will be as convenient as a
format as HTML would be - but with the advantage that:
* we can do the changes incrementally, no big-bang necessary
* there is no (or minimal) impact on the l10n
* it is not blocking any later migration to "something else"
* it keeps the semantics
* it keeps the possibility to embed help files between themselves
So let me propose some cleanups I'd like to do:
* get rid of the old attributes that were used only for the
helpcontent -> helpcontent2 migration (like the 'oldref' or 'l10n'
attribute)
* make the 'id' attribute non-mandatory, and instead check during the
build for the presence of the id's that are referenced from somewhere
+ this needs to be done carefully not to affect l10n
* get rid of xml-lang attribute, and instead mark only the strings that
are _not_ supposed to be translated.
* make role="paragraph" the default, so only the headings need to be
marked
With this, the help descriptions would change from:
<paragraph role="heading" id="hd_id3145649" xml-lang="en-US" level="2" l10n="U" oldref="13">Heading</paragraph>
<paragraph role="paragraph" id="par_id3145663" xml-lang="en-US" l10n="U" oldref="14">The actual text...</paragraph>
to
<paragraph role="heading" level="2">Heading</paragraph>
<paragraph>The actual text...</paragraph>
which is hopefully not much more complex than HTML, and yet possible
incrementally, and without affecting l10n or other parts of the existing
workflow.
Going further, we can later change 'paragraph' to 'p', introduce 'h2' as
a shortcut for <paragraph role="heading" level="2"> too, if we with so;
but for the moment, I think there are XHP features that are worth
keeping, because as a format, it gives more semantics to the text than a
plain HTML would do.
Any objections, please?
Thank you,
Kendy