Re: generating standalone html with gnome xsl stylesheets (gtkmm)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 01:38 -0500, Peter Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 23:41 -0600, Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
> > Thanks, Peter.  I tried out the htmlweb stylesheet a bit but I noticed
> > that it took forever.  I haven't looked to try to determine what the
> > issue is (maybe some excessive recursion or something?).  Here are the
> > timings using the different stylesheets with everything else the same:
> > 
> > using db2html.xsl
> > real    0m3.079s
> > user    0m2.685s
> > sys     0m0.284s
> > 
> > using db2htmlweb.xsl
> > real    1m43.518s
> > user    1m39.855s
> > sys     0m0.974s
> 
> Right, I noticed that they were slow for me too. I think the issue is in
> the sidebar TOC generation that I tried to do -- that's pretty much the
> only non-cosmetic change. There is some recursion and a call to an EXSLT
> function, set:intersection, that might be slow. The sidebar isn't even
> coming out the way that I want it to, too, but I haven't had the time to
> fix things up.

I'm sorry I haven't really had a chance to look at this yet.
My holiday schedule is really hectic.  I should be able to
work on this starting in the second weak of January.

I think the TOC sidebar can be generated using the existing
autotoc templates.  A little CSS and a few parameters can go
a long way in generalizing the output.  As far as speed goes,
there are some nice tricks that can make this sort of thing
really fly, but I'll have to dig into it more.

> > So clearly there's something going on there.  I like what you've done
> > in general, though.  There's a couple things I might change, and a
> > couple css issues like you mentioned, but other than that, it's a good
> > start.  If I get some time I'll try to tackle some of the issues I
> > found, but I'm pretty much an xsl novice.  Would it be helpful for you
> > if I provided a more detailed list of issues I've found?   (also, if
> > this is off-topic for gnome-doc-devel, please let me know.  I've only
> > just joined)
> 
> Might as well send this stuff to the list. I don't think there's
> actually agreement that these templates should be merged into g-d-u,
> improving them can only bolster the case that they should be.

The only thing I'm not convinced of is that these need to
be separate stylesheets.  I think most of this stuff can
really be merged directly into the db2html stylesheets.
The default output of those should be suitable for display
on the web.  Yelp can set parameters and do customizations
as much as needed.

The only thing that might need to go separately would be
any sort of Gnome-branding output, such as making headers
that fit into the Gnome site.  Even here, though, I think
we should try to put as much of the functionality into the
db2html stylesheets as possible, and then have a very thin
gnomeweb.xsl customization stylesheet.

Combine this all with your gnome-doc-process script and
we've got a powerful but simple DocBook toolchain.  And
fast.  Let's not forget fast.  I love fast.

As for whether this is on-topic here: absolutely yes.
This is exactly what I wanted to happen when I split
Yelp's stylesheets into a separate package.  I just
never had the time to make it happen.

--
Shaun