Hi Sina, please see my response at the bottom.
Sina K. Heshmati wrote:
"Denis Bradford" <[email protected]> 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.
I don't see how the distinction you draw between DocBook and Website is
fundamental. The DocBook stylesheets for PDF and HTML Help don't
represent different goals, they're just different outputs from a single
source.
That was the point I tried to make in citing my own work experience,
where it would have been useful to publish not only to help and PDF, but
also to collection of web pages, all from the same source.
Of course, if the work is beyond the scope of this GSoC project, I
completely understand.
Thanks,
Denis
SinDoc
I guess the distinction you draw between DocBook and Website doesn't
seem fundamental to me.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
