Re: [docbook-apps] New Branch: website5

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

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.

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.

Thanks,
Denis