Ross Gardler wrote: > David Crossley wrote: > >Ross Gardler wrote: > >>David Crossley wrote: > >> > >>>Are you just talking about the stylesheet or the DTDs too? > >>>The trouble with the DTDs is that they will make this > >>>plugin, and our SVN trunk, very cumbersome. How many > >>>versions of Full DocBook and Simplified DocBook will > >>>we support? > > ... > > >The issue is more about efficiency. When the xml parser > >encounters a document type declaration in an xml instance, > >then it must resolve the DTD and everything that is thereby > >referenced. So if you don't provide local copies, then there > >are network trips on every parse. > > > >We could not provide them, and just give people > >documentation about how to configure their own. > >In fact we already have that. > > > >The trouble is that they don't. Then poor Forrest > >would appear awfully slow to them. > > How about we enhance the plugin install mechanism to offer to download > an additional package of DTD's. So the install process would be: > > - set forrest.properties > - forrest > - approve plugin licenses (to be done) > - specify required DTD's > - install selected DTD's > > This way we can tell users, "these DTD's are xMb, are you sure you want > to install them? If you don't install them then Forrest will only work > whilst you are online and will not perform as fast"
This is exactly the point that we arrived the last time that we discussed this topic. So i presume that we need to develop a "DTD package descriptor". Some issues ... * Sometimes DTDs are in a compressed archive, complete with an "XML Catalog" which defines each resource and maps it to a local relative URI. * Sometimes there is a single DTD file. * Sometimes a DTD refers to other pieces via local references. * Sometimes there is no "XML Catalog" provided, so we will need a default one. * How would Forrest automatically know that the DTDs are needed? Perhaps we can have an Ant thing to scan their project source tree and match document type declarations with the installed XML Catalogs. It is not my immediate itch to take on this job, but i will certainly help where i can. There is also a need for a similar download mechanism for sets of XSL stylesheets. For example, the Apache XML Commons website uses Forrest. For the Resolver documentation, Forrest uses the Forrest-supplied DocBook DTDs and the project sitemap has a hard-coded URL to the local system-supplied Full DocBook XSLs. David
