Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Can website dtd do page "masters"?

["Lassi A. Tuura" <lat@iki.fi>]

> No, there's no support for that at the moment. It could be done "by
> hand", coding up different templates for pages with particular roles
> or with particular relationships to other pages, etc.

OK I see.  I'll probably modify the stylesheet to do masters then, as
that probably generalises better for our use, and is more likely to be
useful for others.

> | We also need to integrate with other
> | page generators; I'd need to see how I can do that.
> 
> Can you explain what you mean by "other page generators" and
> "integration" in this context?

Tools that generate web pages from some external source and take as
input banners and trailers and such to customise them to our needs.  For
us, this is mainly to generate reference web pages from our source code
with a tool called doxygen (but there are others, like on-line cgi web
servers, webified presentations etc).  We need to spit out suitable page
fragments for these.

My plan was to have a dummy web page with placeholder content, ask
website to produce a page, and then run a perl script to separate the
generated dummy page into the suitable fragments for the tools.  Or
something like that.

I suppose it could be done the other way as well, first generate the
pages with minimal surroundings, but the problem then is that a) there
are hundreds if not thousands of html pages, and b) it probably isn't
well-formed html and certainly not xml so sucking it into xsl seems
difficult.  Maybe it could be done with a perl script and not xsl, hmm.

If anyone has other ideas, I'd love to hear...

> | I was thinking of `<config param="master" value="some-layout"/>' on a
> | web page which would then pull in `some-layout' to produce that page
> | (some-layout could be a .xml template, or a .xsl or ...).  There would
> 
> It's an interesting idea. I'll think about it a bit and see if I have
> any inspiration.

If you do, please let me know.  At any rate, I'll prototype something
today, you can then see if you have a better idea (probably you will
:-).

> The website stylesheets are pretty stable. I'll probably do the 2.0 "real"
> release sometime next week.

Great, that sounds excellent!

//lat
-- 
Real programmers don't read manuals.  Reliance on a reference
is a hallmark of the novice and the coward.