[Petal] Petal 0.86 Released

[Ronald Hayden]

My team is in the middle of completely revamping the developer 
documentation publishing process.  When our first complete pass at this 
is released, I'll be sure to send some pointers to the results and 
summarize what we're doing.

I suspect this may all get wrapped up into a talk at some point...we're 
doing some fun stuff!

I'll just mention now that I had stayed away from templating and 
transformation systems for quite a while, because they tended to be 
comprised of a lot of programming-like syntax and added a lot of custom 
tags or processing tags, and our templates are maintained by 
graphics/layout professionals who are not programmers.  Not to mention 
my strong belief that simplicity is key to maintainability.

However, when a team-member found Petal, we adopted it within 24 hours, 
completely rewriting our core tools around it... because we could do 
almost everything we needed by adding "condition" and "repeat" 
attributes to our own tags, not having to add a single custom tag or 
processing tag to get the job done.

Petal perfectly fits my requirements for our mission critical 
publishing tools, and I'm picky!

(Note that I'm not allowed to to be a spokeperson for my employer, or 
to endorse products/tools in their name, even when I want to, so my 
comments will have to stay on the mailing list...)

  -- Ron

On Tuesday, February 25, 2003, at 05:39  PM, jhiver at mkdoc.com wrote:

>> Thanks very much for the quick response!  This was a pretty big
>> showstopper for us -- I'll jump on the update right away and let you
>> know if there are any problems.
>
> Please do! It would be really interesting to see what you're doing 
> with the
> Petal library, and how :)
>
> Best Regards,
> Jean-Michel.
>