On Sat, 29 Dec 2007, "Travis E. Oliphant" apparently wrote:
they make it so that the documentation standard for SciPy and NumPy is not different from the ETS standard
1. Is the Enthought Tool Suite standard published?
2. I think it miscasts things to say that the previous standard was built around a rendering tool. The previous standard was tied to reStructuredText, which happens to be renderable by epydoc. In the future, other tools will render reStructuredText. Indeed, we are all free to offer one right now (or to contribute to epydoc).
3. The point of the reStructuredText, which has been developed over many years, is to make (with very light markup) a number of semantic distinctions which have proved useful and desirable. If these distinctions are not drawn in the markup, they cannot be used by any renderer.
4. reST offers way to render math (as MathML or LaTeX->PDF). At one point, iirc, this was considered a plus.
I am NOT trying to push for any particular documentation standard. I'm just a NumPy user, not a NumPy developer. But I would like to suggest that it might be useful to ask David Goodger for a quick overview of what will be lost by using the ETS markup standard instead of reST.
fwiw, Alan Isaac