Move to XML, new converter to HTML etc

[laszlo kovacs <laszlo kovacs Sun COM>]

Hello,

It is quite important for me to have some kind of plan up to Gnome 2.0
about the documentation processing and display related issues.

This is what I think is supposed to happen according to what has been
discussed at GUADEC:

1. Move docs to XML from DocBook SGML (I am a bit lost between the
acronyms and various types of SGML and XML, but I hope it is obvious
what I am talking about).

2. Develop a new xml->html converter (instead of gnome-db2html2) based
on libxml2 and libxslt.

3. Move Scrollkeeper to libxml2 and libxslt and do further development.

4. That's all I remember, note that I deliberately not mentioned
documentation content related stuff (like how good the developer docs
are etc).

libxslt needs XML as input.

I think we should have a plan for 1-3. My main problem is obviously 3.
Technically Daniel's SGMLparser supplied for gnome-db2html2 (to turn the
SGML stuff to valid XML) should be good for me to apply to docs and then
implement all sorts of cool features with libxml2 and libxslt on top of
it in Scrollkeeper. I looked into this and the SGML parser seems to have
problems, one of the most important ones being that it does not resolve
external entities (Laszlo assumes here that external entities are
included SGML files in other SGML files). Considering that we move our
docs to XML anyway soon and Sun's next official Gnome release will be
2.0 I really dont feel like trying to fix the SGML parser and then throw
it out in a couple of weeks or months. Right now there are two people
working on Scrollkeeper here, Mary Dwyer and myself. Mary works on index
extraction, seach and integration of this in Nautilus. A couple of days
ago we also got a large amount of Solaris specific Gnome work to do. If
we can not work on Scrollkeeper then we have to move to the other
projects and later on we will probably not be able to come back whenever
we want. And we can not work on Scrollkeeper until the SGML docs are not
turned to XML or the SGML parser is not fixed (although I dont think we
should invest time in this as the docs will be turned to XML anyway). So
the way how I see it we need the docs (or at least some of them) turned
to XML in order to work. Probably some test XML docs only (not in the
CVS) would help at the beginning. I think 1-3 could be done in parallel
avoiding to put stuff in Gnome CVS if this is a problem at the
beginning.

Finally some questions related to 1-2.

How difficult it is to turn DocBook SGML docs to XML? Is it automatic or
it will be done by hand? Do we have any idea how to develop the libxslt
based converter and who will do it? The libxslt library contains
stylesheets to convert DocBook XML(?) to HTML, I dont know if these are
good enough, but if they are then the new converter is very easy to
implement (DV - any opinion?).

I know that there are some releases up to 2.0 which might make planning
difficult, but I dont know any dates about them.

That's about it for the moment.

Any thoughts?

Laszlo