Re: [docbook-apps] New Branch: website5

["Sina K. Heshmati" <sina@khakbaz.com>]

"Doug" <doug.duboulay@gmail.com> said:
> 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?

Thanks for sharing Doug.

Please see my last post in the same thread. These features are nice to have in DocBook Website and people start implementing them should they need them, just like you did. However, the primary goal of DocBook Website is not to publish DocBook documents on the Web. This is something that should be accomplished by HTML stylesheets.

SinDoc