[drupal-docs] XHTML in our documentation - Textile, Markdown, ...

[Moshe Weitzman]

The new push for docs is terrific. I think this may be a good time for 
our next quantum leap - XHTML (or other calid XML). Today, our book 
content is in plain old HTML with inconsistent tags, unclosed tags, no 
style consistency, etc. This makes it very hard to reuse the content 
we've so painstakenly authored.

I propose that we ditch HTML authoring and use author using Markdown [1] 
or Textile [2] formats. These formats are easy to learn, and always 
output valid XHTML. Plus, we already have Drupal modules for each. Also, 
I think it will be easier to communicate style rules using one of these 
syntaxes (e.g. "top level headlines begin with **").

Dries has long wanted a DocBook like format for our documentation. I 
think Markdown and Textile are like Docbook in that they can be 
converted to any format. But unlike DocBook, they are easily 
comprehended by all.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[2] http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/