Re: Move to XML, new converter to HTML etc

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

Converting the docs from SGML to XML is very easy if they were written
according to our recommendations (i.e., lowercase tags, no tag
minimisation, etc.) In this case, all you have to do is to change DTD
and then deal with self-closing tags. This can be done by a simple
script; in some cases, minor manual intervention will be
required. Also, there are some minor differences between DocBook3.1
(which we are using, and which only has SGML version) and DocBook 4.1
(which is the latest one, and has SGML and XML versions - we'll be
using the latter). Anyway, this is not a big deal - I could convert all
my docs in a day. 



Laszlo, Daniel: how easy is (2)? Would it be possible to produce
something working within the next month so that we could start playing
with it? 

And yes, I quite agree that it makes little sense to invest any 
work on gnome-db2html2, or any other form of SGML parsing other than
bug fixing - better concentrate on XML.


My 2 kopecks. 

Sasha


On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 02:33:05PM +0100, laszlo kovacs wrote:
> 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
> 
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