Re: Move to XML, new converter to HTML etc

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

> 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).

  Should not be too hard to fix in my opinion. Entities decalrations
are parsed, they should be registered. When an entity reference occurs
a parser input is generated from the URI-Reference and pushed on the
open entities stack and parsing continues. Not a big deal the XML parser
does similar things already

> 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.

  Whatever the amount of work you want to put in it transition to XML
will probably take more than that, 

> 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

  I tend to disagree a bit there, for purely practical matters

> 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?

  I think it can be automated, I'm not sure people will like what it
does to their document.

> 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?).

  The KDE project is using libxslt to format their docbook docs. I think
they just wrote an customization stylesheet on top of Norman Walsh default
stylesheet.

Daniel

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