On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Travis Low wrote:
> Jon Stevens wrote:
>
> > I hate to state the obvious (again), but all of this stuff is already
> > checked into CVS in the xdocs/ directory. If you wish to change the look and
> > feel of things to improve your experience with them, then please feel free
> > to send in a patch.
> >
> > You (the users) have complete control over this stuff and making suggestions
> > for changes on the list really doesn't help solve the problem; patches and
> > source code do.
>
> If I make a change to xdocs, how do I generate the website to view the changes
> before submitting them?
./build.sh docs
The xdocs will be transformed via xslt stylesheets and are
output into the docs directory. There is very little formatting
in the xml docs themselves, most the the formatting is controlled
by the xslt stylesheets in the xdocs/skin/stylesheets directory.
That's where formatting changes should be made.
> Can typical html editors work with these xml files? I use xemacs, so I have no
> excuse. In fact, your note goaded me into spending some time looking at the raw
> docs. But have you made the documentation inaccessible to those who use html
> editors?
Oh well. The goal is consistency, and the xdocs aren't that hard to
deal with. When we have 30-40 documents there is no way we will
be able to maintain them if we have to edit html. There is
definitely a little overhead in learning the stylesheets, but
it easily allows formatting changes. The whole site can be
altered in a matter of seconds. For example some of the
formatting problems people are seeing could probably be
fixed with a simple change to the stylesheet, quickly
regenerate the site and it's fixed. Having to search/replace
all the html docs would be a PITA and would eventually lead
to inconsistencies.
Plus there is a way to transform the XML docs into a PDF
using the xml-fop package. We are using this for Velocity
and I'll push that functionality into the turbine xdocs
soon.
Plus you can apply any "skin" you like to the xdocs to
make them look differently. There is a skin that allows
the generation of printer friendly docs. The benefits
of using XML for the docs far outweigh not being able
to use an HTML editor.
jvz.
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