Did we ever determine what OReilly's position on XML and particular DTDs is?
I did ask Frank Willison (editor in chief of O'Reilly, and for those of you who don't know, a big Python fan) in the hall after the doc-sig extravaganza. He says that they think they have a working system now which works on DocBook, but that it was damn hard to setup the system. The problem was that the DocBook Book tried to tackle every corner of the spec, which was just really hard. This is from memory and was encoded when I was pretty exhausted, so I won't swear to the exactitude of the recall. I am not expert enough on large-scale text processing to fully understand the implications of specific DTD choices, but I think that the impact of a specific DTD choice is a minor one in the absence of XML editors for the masses (i.e., Fred did the work before, and realistically, Fred's going to be doing the work in the foreseeable future at least -- Fred should choose what he wants to use). He's already done the hard part of regularizing the markup and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to buy him a beer at IPC8.
So, does anyone else have any comments on David's proposal? Can we work towards a new set of "Structured Text for DocStrings" rules that people can start using for their docstrings?
I think I need to put up working code before folks really get a feel for it, along with a cleaned up description of the format (different strokes for different folks). Not everyone followed every thread of the last couple of months, and I apologize for not having put forth a revised proposal sooner. I'll ping Ken to find out what the status of their internal reworking of StructuredText-the-code is. FWIW, I don't care much whether we use their code or not. I care more about having a common 'base grammar' and then specific extensions for docstrings (and they can have specific extensions for other things as they see fit). --david It's interesting how the percentage of time that I can allocate to Python has grown proportionally less than the number of Python-related items on my todo list =).