Re: Roadmap to Euphoria 4.2
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Sep 05, 2019
- 1443 views
nothing wrong with creole markup syntax because it was designed to be generic and intuitive
There's nothing wrong with Creole itself. The problem is that the world seems to have forgotten about it, including its original authors. There have been no updates to the Creole website for over ten years.
Meanwhile Markdown, which predates Creole by a few years, has been continuously adopted, improved, and standardized (in the form of CommonMark) and is now in very wide use all over the world.
So as I stated, I think Markdown has won that format war and it's one of many things we need to adapt to if we want to stay relevant and attract new users and developers.
The missing final step is to provide a single download so users can have offline html docs that provide:
- tree navigation
- better searching
- indexing
I think these are all good improvements worthy of a new documentation system. I just don't think now is the time to upend the documentation.
The CHM format takes html and puts into a single download--with navigation and searching. The curse is: even Microsoft has abandoned the format, Microsoft makes it messy to create; CHM was never fully adopted by Linux. CHM is not an obvious solution to docs even if Phix uses it.
I don't think CHM is a good idea. I think HTML should be the main format for documentation.
One idea I suggested earlier was to store the documentation in an intermediate format, a database like EDS or SQLite.
We could use that to ship a help browser application similar to CHM. I wrote something like this fifteen years ago, called Help File Maker (see The Archive).
This is part of my motivation for trying to bundle a basic GUI library with a Euphoria release: it would be helpful to have some GUI utilities bundled in the distribution.
-Greg
