Building on Melinda's comments, I recently helped a couple of new authors. I pointed them to the XML template and the plug-in to XMLmind. They produced a draft rather quickly with very few questions. They had not worked much with XML, but had enough experience with other format languages. They made use of the plug-in features and used it differently than I do. I switch back to see the XML and fix things. They were just excited to generate a draft in which they felt they were contributing.
On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 2:09 PM Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm really not at all convinced that our tooling is, by itself,
presenting any kind of meaningful barrier to participation. People
learn how to use new tools all the time, and at any rate if we
have any goals here I think it's to find ways to see that people
have the tools they need and want, not to take away options.
That said, I do think that our tooling tends to reinforce the
view that we're ossified, slow, inflexible, and behind the times,
and I suspect that contributes to us being somewhat unattractive
to potential new participants. I.e. it's cultural rather than
technical.
Melinda
--
Melinda Shore
melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx
Software longa, hardware brevis
Best regards,
Kathleen
