Re: [docbook-apps] New Branch: website5

[Denis Bradford <denis.bradford@verizon.net>]

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.
> 
> 
>