Re: sgml in help dir (was Re: Hello)

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Dan Mueth (d-mueth@uchicago.edu) wrote at 00:28 on 23/07/00:
> 
> On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, John Fleck wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 11:46:50PM +0300, Ali Abdin wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Actually - I would begin to advocate for application owners to also install
> > > the SGML files into the help dir (naturally, in the appropriate locale
> > > setting).
> > > 
> > > We are getting much closer to getting help working dynamically in Nautilus.
> > > There is one 'caveat' though - I'm not sure how the organization will be.
> > > Currently it looks icky, and i haven't even seen the code :)
> > > 
> > Should we be doing this on the next round of releases?
> 
> I think so.  Ali - do you forsee any problems here?  Judging by how
> well Jonathan's gnome-db2html was working, I think this is quite
> reasonable.  Hopefully we can move over to XML too.  Norman Walsh said
> SGML is dead and XML is ready, so we probably will want to move over
> before GNOME 1.4.  I haven't actually tested any of the tools, so we
> should do this.  I think Jonathan put gnome-db2html together with XML,
> more than SGML, in mind.

I strongly advise all applications install the SGML file with the HTML
file(s) starting from now. Even if help is 'not ready' by Nautilus 1.0, it
certainly won't hurt to have the SGML files there.

Actually - I've been toying around with gnome-db2html2 :) You obviously
haven't tried it that much. I need it to recognize the <menuchoice> tag and
<guisubmenu> tag. I also need to tweak the behavior of the <guimenu> tag :)
Otherwise you will not have the same output as Jade :(

Oh - and also - gnome-db2html2 totally goes CRAZY when there is a '%' symbol
in the docs. I am not really sure why (I currently do not have the time to try
and trace it down - In fact consider me 'out of order' until August 1st (damn
summer course)). 

To be honest I really do not know the difference between Docbook/SGML and
Docbook/XML :& All the docs I've seen 'appear' to be Docbook/XML - but maybe
I'm just ignorant/naive :) I think gnome-db2html2 is XML-oriented (i.e. it
uses libxml's SAX parser). Anyway, jrb can give you more info on that :)

Ali Abdin