[publican-list] Re: <section status="draft"> ignored

[Jeff Fearn]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 02:15:51PM +1000, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> 
>> When you remove draft from the root node, you are saying the book, in 
>> it's entirety, is complete. You can not have incomplete bits in a 
>> complete book, therefore marking only bits of a book as draft is a mixed 
>> metaphor and is wrong.
> 
> This is open content, where we want to release early and often.  We
> don't try to release 100% bug free software, either.  It should be
> possible to add beta/draft content to a document and mark it as such.

Firstly, documentation isn't software and you can't treat them the same way; but 
even if you were going to do that, this statement is wrong.

You don't mark 2 or 3 functions in your software as beta, you mark the whole thing 
as beta. Likewise you don't mark 2 or 3 blocks of text as draft, you mark the 
whole thing draft.

You can use remark tags for a more localised way of marking a block to be 
reviewed. The remarks have confronting colours and will stand out from surrounding 
text. Furthermore if you put the remark in the title of a block that appears in 
the TOC then the remark gets placed, in the confronting colour, in the TOC, so 
people can see in the TOC where to go to review.

I don't think we should break what appears to be the publishing industry use of 
draft when the remark tag should be sufficient for this use case.

Cheers, Jeff.