Re: [docbook-apps] New Branch: website5

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca>]

On 05/20/2010 11:54 AM, Sina K. Heshmati wrote:
> "Denis Bradford"<denis.bradford@verizon.net>  said:
>
>    
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>      
> Some of these features are indeed useful for both DocBook HTML output and DocBook Website but please note the fundamental distinction between DocBook and DocBook Website. DocBook helps format documents and publish them anywhere, including the Web whereas DocBook Website helps publish *websites* on the Web and only on the Web.
>    

I think things aren't quite as clear-cut as that: As an interesting 
use-case, consider Sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/), which started out 
as a "documentation tool". It is based on ReST (with its existing 
formatters), but adds superstructure to it.
There, generating a "website" proper is just a side-product (or almost).

Taking this to DocBook, I think it would be nice if DB Website content 
could be published into an inter-connected set of (pdf) articles or 
somesuch.  (Since the stylesheets for individual page content already 
exists, I imagine that the only new bits required would be templates 
that use the website structure information ("layout" or similar), and 
generate appropriate inter-document links from that, as well as other 
toplevel things such as an index, TOC, etc.)

But, that's just an idea, and may not fit into this GSoC project. Still, 
it's worthwhile thinking of this for some future work.

Thanks,
         Stefan

-- 

       ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...