[RT] distributing docs in JavaHelp format

[Bertrand Delacretaz]

Sorry about another wild idea about our docs, but this one looks closer  
than many, so I'll try to inspire/motivate someone to jump in ;-)

JavaHelp [3], as the name implies, is a java-based help system that  
runs client-side.

Uses HTML 3.2 files for content, with a couple of metadata files, and  
provides full-text indexing and author-maintained indexes, the whole  
thing ("helpset") can be packed in a jar.

It seems like it would be fairly easy to generate JavaHelp documents  
from our docs, see  [1] for example.

This would have many advantages IMHO:
-Website and wiki docs together as a single source of information.
-Efficient client-side full-text search.
-Improving authored indexes incrementally is possible by adding  
keywords and marking important words in our docs (see <indexterm> in  
the above example) when someone has time to do it, no upfront work  
required.
-No additional load on ASF servers (even less assuming people would use  
this more than website docs).
-No need to change our docs format or infrastructure.
-Happy users, most probably ;-)

What's needed:
-Generate a simplified HTML 3.2 format from both xdocs and wiki pages  
(a couple of pipelines)
-Generate the Javahelp helpset, TOC, map and index files (more simple  
pipelines)
-Ant tasks to automate this (some projects have them apparently, see  
[2])

So, if anyone has more copious free time than me, you could be the  
Savior Of Our Docs until we have a better web-based solution ;-)

-Bertrand

[1] http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/4285
[2]  
http://nbbuild.netbeans.org/nonav/nbantext-javadoc/org/netbeans/ 
nbbuild/JHIndexer.html
[3] http://java.sun.com/products/javahelp/