I currently use AxKit to transform my custom XML source files to HTML and 
PDF on the fly. I'm in the process of moving over to Docbook for our 
Journal markup. A requirement of this new system is to be able to use the 
olink functionality that Docbook provides for creating cross-document 
links.

The basic process as I understand it is as follows.

1. Create your Docbook documents, each with a unique id attribute on the 
root element

2. Add olinks where appropriate

3. Create a target database document (This is basically an XML sitemap 
which maps all documents in the collection to their location on the 
filesystem)

4. Generate target data files (To do this you run one of the Docbook XSL 
stylesheets on the document. It produces a file named target.db which 
contains information of all possible reference points in the document.)

5. Generate output files (Process the XML with one of the Docbook XSL 
files, to generate the html files in their final locations - as defined in 
the target database document ^3^)
What I don't understand, is how this process can work in a dynamic setup 
like AxKit. All the documentation takes the stance that you are processing 
all your XML files into a html output directory - which is obviously not 
the case when using AxKit.
The given example of a target database document looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE targetset SYSTEM 
"file:///tools/docbook-xsl/common/targetdatabase.dtd" 
[ <!ENTITY ugtargets SYSTEM "file:///doc/userguide/target.db">
<!ENTITY agtargets SYSTEM "file:///doc/adminguide/target.db">
<!ENTITY reftargets SYSTEM "file:///doc/man/target.db"> ]>
 <targetset>
        <targetsetinfo> Description of this target database document, 
which is for the examples in olink doc. </targetsetinfo>
        <!-- Site map for generating relative paths between documents -->
        <sitemap>
                <dir name="documentation">
                        <dir name="guides">
                        <dir name="mailuser">
                                <document targetdoc="MailUserGuide" 
baseuri="userguide.html"> &ugtargets; </document>
                        </dir>
                </dir>
        </dir>
</sitemap>
</targetset>
So you can see that the baseuri attribute is the name of the html file 
that was created in the output process Would I just specify the baseuri 
attribute as "userguige.xml?style=html"? But then if I do that, what 
happens when I change the way I generate the html file... I'll have to 
update the sitemap file to reflect this right?
I guess what I want to know is, what is the advantage of generating this 
html file on the fly at runtime? Is it not just going to put unnecessary 
strain on my webserver (the reason I ask is that I noticed when 
dynamically generating html for a fairly large Docbook document, my apache 
process grew to over 100m! - is this normal??)
I will also need to generate PDF files from the Docbook. There are 
stylesheets which do this included with the Docbooc XSL files... but again 
- do I really want to regenerate the PDF every time it is requested... or 
should I just generate it off-line using xsltproc and put the generated 
file onto my website?
Does anyone have any experience of using Docbook with AxKit (specifically 
olinks) that they can share?

thanks

-- 
Tom Kirkpatrick
Web Developer - Virus Bulletin

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