This is the mail archive of the
davenport@berkshire.net
mailing list for the Davenport project.
Re: DAVENPORT: DocBook for documenting Python code
>> and I've never found typing the markup all that problematic, so
>> I'm biased.
Konrad> I found that in many cases the markup is much longer than
Konrad> the actual text!
I think this is a common misconception. Abbreviations are not hard to
program into your editor, so that you can do <emphasis> with a single
keystroke.
If you are talking about disk space, MS-Word files are much longer
than the plain text in them, overwhelmingly more so than DocBook
source files.
If you are talking about typing time, apart from the abstract-seeming
fact that typing content-based markup now saves much time far down the
line, there is also the fact that typing ^C ^E em TAB (short phrase
here) ^C ^C / does not take longer than selecting boldface from a
WYSIWYG menu, even if you have a keyboard shortcut.
Typing time is only a fraction of authoring time. The same goes for
writing code.
Most time goes into maintainance, so maintainability is worth a lot of
extra typing.