POSHDOC Features

Summary

POSHDOC is a universal file format for the documentation purposes of knowledge workers.

It can be used immediately on virtually any computer and operating system and does not need any special software for reading or writing.

POSHDOC conveys semantic information about its content, which can be exploited by publishing systems or any other document processing system. Almost all of them support POSHDOC out of the box right now.

POSHDOC encourages reuse of information. Write information once, then mix and match it in different final documents: printed manuals, online, in books, or as help files.

You are reading a POSHDOC right now, POSHDOC is HTML — with a twist.

Features

Universally applicable

POSHDOCs are plain HTML and can be viewed by any browser — even on text browsers — without any loss of information.

Safe

POSHDOCs are stripped of all interactive and design specific content. The resulting POSHDOC/HTML files are safe to open in any browser and do not exhibit common exploits of this format.

Move them anywhere you please

Just copy a POSHDOC page or POSHDOC collection to any other computer and use it again. All internal links are relative and will continue to work.

Mix and Merge

Copy any subcollection inside another POSHDOC and link to it and it will automatically become part of the new document.

Immediately publishable

Just copy a POSHDOC anywhere onto a webserver and it is published on the web.

In fact, this website is written on my laptop and published on the web by committing it to a revision control directory accessible via a webserver.

No special or proprietary software required

There exists a wealth of HTML editors out there, and you can use any of them for creating POSHDOCs. You can even edit a POSHDOC with a plain text editor. I do this with this POSHDOC too.

Conversion friendly

Open a POSHDOC in MS-Word or LibreOffice, you will be able to convert it immediately without loss into the respective document format.

Use pandoc or any HTML-to-* converter to convert it to Markdown, OrgMode, LaTeX, an eBook, PDF, Word, … you name it.

What POSHDOC is NOT

POSHDOC is not a desktop publishing format. It is kind of the opposite. Even if POSHDOCs look nice and organized in the browser or in you favorite word processor, the only thing they contain is content and structure. By design it does not contain any formatting or design instructions.