Neat! That ought to prove my point -- both of us can't be wrong.
Doug wrote:
On Thu, 20 May 2010, Denis Bradford wrote:
Not sure if this the best place to post this, but here goes:
Sina, I'm so glad to see active development on Website, it's such a
terrific product. As long as you're thinking about its next stage of
development, has anyone suggested folding Website into DocBook? I use
both all the time, and I think each has features that could enhance the
other.
I once implemented a doc set that pulled together a bunch of DocBooks
and some non-DocBook content using an olink sitemap. I was amazed to
learn how powerful sitemaps and generated olink databases are. It
occurred to me that they could be used to do far more than enable
olinks: they contain all the metadata you need to organize and process a
whole doc system -- not unlike Website layouts (and ditamaps, for that
matter). On the company web site we served our doc set as an Eclipse
infocenter, but I couldn't help thinking how much easier it would have
been to post it as a Website.
Another example, on the Website side: why should only books and help
systems have an index? It's a great navigation tool for an informational
web site, too. So, I hacked the Website stylesheets to generate a
DocBook index for the site. Not pretty XSL, but my readers love the index.
Sorry for bringing this up again.
I did this myself as a DocBook Website customization/rewrite.
Its called tabular-toc:
http://docbook.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docbook/trunk/contrib/xsl/tabular-
toc/
It differs from website in that you have to role your own autolayout.xml,
but after, the entire hierarchical web-site table of contents cascades
down into every html page of every webpage, and chunked book, part, article
across the whole website (using the website "tabular" style).
Only two examples:
http://xtal.sourceforge.net/
http://cima.chem.usyd.edu.au:8080/cif/skunkworks/html/index.html
In addition, you could just feed it a single document, like a book, and
it would build the books TOC, in website tabular style into every
chunked page. (theres an example in with the source)
Of course I did it modifying website in XSLT-1.1 and the new project is
supposed to be XSLT-2, but maybe some of it can be cannibalised?
I realize this is not a trivial thing. Besides the layout, there doesn't
appear to be much difference between the DocBook and Website (full)
documents -- mostly a few elements at the top. But the big difference is
in the processing, and that would no doubt require a lot of work to bridge.
Yeah. It did.
The benefits just might be worth the effort. Making Website a DocBook
output option, instead of a separate dialect, would increase its value
for technical documentation -- a low-tech, frameless alternative to
Eclipse infocenters and HTML-based help browsers.
Well I thought so.
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