Re: Lua Encyclopedia

["Peter Hill" <corwin@...>]

Peter Hill:
>Lua code itself is a powerful data format...

Andy Stark:
>  I don't really understand what Peter Hill means by "a Lua data format".
(snip)
> A data format that I am unaware of which is known to be highly accessible
to Lua code?

Lua basically evolved from a data definition language and is still suitable
for such. Basically one just executes the data file as a lua program and it
creates an appropriate table.


lhf (and Joshua Jensen):
>...like XML, but before its time...

Andy Stark:
> Agreed, but the person producing the manual doesn't necessarily know Lua.
> For example, a company that embeds a Lua interpreter in its products might
> produce a printed manual with the ALARM as an appendix. I think it is fair
> to say that the company's technical writers, publishers, etc might be more
> likely to know about XML than Lua.

Ah, but the manual's *maintainer* would know Lua. And you've already said
that it would then be extracted to a variety of formats like XML, HTML, etc
so that a manual's printer could pick and choose.


> Anyway, the stuff that I already have is in XML. It will have to be
> transformed into Lua if that seems to be the best solution.

Pretty trivial if we decide to go that route :-).


> If you are in any doubt, XML data can be transformed into almost any kind
> of text (via XSLT), so it would be possible to generate Lua code from the
> raw data if necessary. And also PDF, HTML, Man pages (I think...) I'm not
> sure I understand where you are coming from on this one.

In the end storing the primary copy of the encyclopedia using Lua data, XML
or even an MSAccess database are all fine. It comes down to (a) which
editting tools the Encyclopedia writer (or writers) have access to and are
happy with and (b) which data format has tools to easily create other
formats.

I just assumed that whoever wrote a Lua Encyclopedia would probably have
access to Lua and so be able to easily write extraction programs that
generated XML and HTML copies (though I don't know about creating a PDF from
Lua).


> I don't think the ALARM would have its home on the wiki. The idea is not
> primarily that people can just add arbitrary comments to each entry like
> "yeah, this one was really helpful" or whatever.

I don't know much about Wiki's but I thought the whole WikiWord concept
actually made alot of Wikis nothing but Encyclopedias! Otoh, a Wiki (being
free-format) will not enforce a rigorous template so auto-extraction to XML
would be a potential problem.

> It would be rather like the Lua source code is at the moment: centrally
> maintained, but open to suggestions and contributions of code.

In that case maybe using a Lua data format would turn out to be a good idea.
People could email the central maintainer complete encyclopedia entries
which could be easily slotted in.


> Anyway, I think the reaction is basically positive, so I will see what I
> can do over the weekend.

Sounds good. :-)

*cheers*
Peter Hill.