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Re: Re: docbook for RPGs


Your message dated: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 21:24:10 -0000
> / J B Bell <cipher@eschatek.com> was heard to say:
> | 1. Is there any sort of "dialog mode" set of tags?  Game examples
> | often have entries where one party is talking to another, and the
> | names are set off, followed by a colon and the text of their speech,
> | alternating back and forth.  QandA doesn't seem to be the right tag.
> 
> No, nothing springs immediately to mind. I might be tempted to hack
> something together with computerinput, useroutput, and prompt, but it
> would definitely be tag abuse.
> 
> You're exploring new territory (cool!), so you may have to invent some
> new markup.

Just an observation, in the unlikely case that someone thinks that
"dialogs" of this type are not needed in the technical documentation
sphere for which Docbook is intended.

A few years back, I wrote a semi-technical document on electronic mail
structures and protocols.  I demonstrated POP and IMAP as informal
dialogs between client and server, like

  Server: Hello, I'm a POP server.
  Client: I'm USER
  Server: Really?  What's your password?
  Client: My password is PASSWORD
  Server: I know you.  Your mailbox has 35 messages amounting to 6729 bytes
  Client: Show me message 35's header
  ...

Because I was composing in LaTeX, I added fairly ad hoc markup like
\begin{dialogue}
 \Server Hello
 \Client I'm User

etc.

A general dialog markup would be a bit more complex, even for simple
things, because there might be more than two participants.  Anyway,
my point is that it's not just for roleplaying games.





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