[Python-Dev] status of development documentation

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:10 PM 12/21/2005 +0100, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>- is it perhaps time to start investigating using "lighter" tools for the core
>documentation ?
>
>(as I hinted, I'd prefer HTML with microformat annotations as the main format;
>with roundtripping to markdown or rest (etc) for people who prefer to 
>author in
>that, and tidy->xhtml->python tools for the HTML generation)

I don't see how HTML is any "lighter" than LaTeX - to me it feels a lot 
heavier, even if you only consider the number of shifted keystrokes needed 
to type it.  And attempting to roundtrip HTML back to reST would lose far 
too much information, like trying to decompile Python bytecode.  I'm +0.5 
for reST, but -1000 for HTML as an authoring format.

The reason I'm only +0.5 for reST is that *any* change from the status quo, 
with so much documentation in existence, has a very high standard to 
meet.  If there were no existing docs to convert, I'd be +1 on reST.