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


"Denis Bradford" <denis.bradford@verizon.net> said:

Hello Denis,

> Not sure if this the best place to post this, but here goes:

Where better than here?

> 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.

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.

That said, DocBook Website can, in theory, support all the features provided by the HTML stylesheets for DocBook but it's important to know that DocBook and DocBook Website do not share a common goal.

SinDoc




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