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Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] New Branch: website5


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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