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Date:      Thu, 10 May 2001 17:26:05 -0700
From:      bmah@freebsd.org (Bruce A. Mah)
To:        "lee z." <lee@bagu.dhs.org>
Cc:        Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org>, "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@freebsd.org>, doc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: install handbook 
Message-ID:  <200105110026.f4B0Q5R12888@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0105091638310.10419-200000@smog.bagu.dhs.org> 
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.21.0105091638310.10419-200000@smog.bagu.dhs.org>

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[long, modified HTML document]

Hi Lee--

OK, here's a few comments on this.  Hopefully you'll take them as the 
constructive criticism they are intended:

1.  First, the HTML page you modified was originally written in another 
markup language called DocBook.  Part of the process of building the 
Handbook (and all of the other FreeBSD documents) involves running a 
program to render the SGML into HTML, PDF, text, or whatever.  What I'm 
getting at is that any changes need to be applied to the SGML source.

(The SGML source for this part of the handbook lives in the doc/ tree, 
in doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml)

2.  Related to the above, SGML more concerned with what the different
parts of a document *are* than what the *look like*.  A lot of the
cosmetic appearance of the Handbook Web pages are defined in the
"stylesheets" the control the conversion process.  A document's
appearance in printed output (e.g. a PDF file designed to be printed)
may be quite different than the corresponding set of HTML pages, even
though the document was generated from the same set of source files.
The point of #1 and #2 is that just going in and hacking on the HTML you
see on the Web site is not likely to be real useful, at least not
directly.

3.  I was trying to figure out the point of turning the different
sections into tables.  I guess I had something else in mind (did you
look at the pointer I sent you to someone else's suggestion?).

4.  We're debating the idea of taking this part of the handbook out.
However, there will still be a supported hardware list in the release
notes; since as I indicated it shares much of the same formatting as
said list in the Handbook, it also has some of the same problems.
Please note that the supported hardware list in the release notes is the
only one being actively maintained, and that it's *much* longer than the
corresponding handbook chapter.

I hope you are not discouraged by these comments.  The takeaway message
I'd like you to get is that the problem is a little different than what
you might have thought it was.  But we still welcome your help!

Thanks!

Bruce.



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