Standards are important for documents too

Standardisation of code is a no-brainer. We need to follow applicable standards so we can interroperate with other pieces of software.

But we also need to follow standards when writing documentation. Example: I'm currently spending today reformatting a (binary) document by hand for changes in document styles. It's going to take 3-4 hours and it's very handrolic. There is no benefit besides consistency to be gained, but since this document is part of a greater set, the changes need to be made.

The problem is that a standard was originally agreed upon, but someone decided to start tweaking the format for some trivial benefit. Now since we had inconsistency, the format was reconsidered and changed substantially. Now I don't have a problem with that, but since the document format is un-machine-editable binary, the changes have to be made by hand. If the document source was XML it would be just an XSLT transformation away.

Laziness is a wonderful attribute of the OSS community. Spend more time upfront to save time later - the downstream task time drops dramatically, as well as gaining many benefits. See Tridge's keynote on auto-generated code in Samba. This is sadly missing in other worlds - the focus is on peep-hole optimisations and not optimising the whole process.

| 27 Apr 2005 | #