[ZDP] The FAQ and the donkey V2

[Martijn Faassen]

Pavlos Christoforou wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Martijn Pieters wrote:
> 
> > At 12:01 15/03/99 , Martijn Faassen wrote:
> > >Darn.
> > >
> > >what about theothermartijn.org, though? :)
> > Available... will faassen@theothermartijn.org do?
> 
> Martijn and Theothermartijn have a weird sense of humor :-)

Well, you started it! :) I was about to say it must be a Dutch sense of
humor, but I think it's more like a hacker sense of humor in the light
of your contributions (assuming you're not Dutch - there's a conspiracy
of Dutch speaking python users, I've discovered, far more Pythoneers
speak Dutch than chance would indicate ;).

> Ok about the CoolFAQ. Progress is slow

I disagree! I think you're steaming ahead, myself. This is just..um..2,
3 weeks after the ZDP started, and we already have a website, a mailing
list, pages of FAQ, and CoolFAQ, version *2* in the pipeline!

> and of course I will open the
> development to everybody as soon as I pretty up my code (in about 2
> days).

Cool!

> The main issue that I had to wrestle with was the DTD and by
> implication the strucure of the FAQ. Even though I had opted for a very
> simple structure initially, eventually I tried to gather together and
> add all the suggestions of the zdp folks, so the DTD is no longer very
> simple. Martijn Faassen might not like the new xml faq documents but he
> asked for it ;-)

Okay, I remember not to grumble then. :)
 
> This is what I came up with:
> 
> A FAQ has an info part and section parts. Section parts have an info part
> and entry parts.

Okay, someone mentioned a while ago that it'd be nice if sections could
have subsections. Now I don't want to load even more horrid complication
on your back, so I'm just dropping in this suggestion as long as you're
sharing your design with us in the list. :) Subsections are not
essential, just would-be-neat. Perhaps for version 2.5.

> An info part contains information about the FAQ, like title, version etc
> and any number of maintainers (or editors)

> Sections also have an info part and can have different maintainers.

And an introduction text, perhaps. Though that could be the first
question as well; in the current FAQ I've been using the first question
to intro the rest, mostly. ("What is DTML?").

I'm not sure if 'version' makes sense in a collaborative environment.
Although perhaps version can automaticall be incremented as soon as an
editor made any changes. Perhaps an editor can 'rate' these changes as
'minor' (some typo correction, a few lines here and there) or 'medium'
(new entries, whole rewrites) or 'major' (complete rewrite, complete
reorganisation), and the CoolFAQ can increase the version in of the
section? Possibly however, 'version' really doesn't make sense, and we
can just get rid of it.
 
[snip design that sounds good]

> I need to put up some basic DTMLs like the side-margin and then ... we'll all dive in!

Awesome! You're doing great work here, Pavlos.

Regards,

Martijn