Re: Move to XML, new converter to HTML etc

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

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

I agree with Sasha's point - this is straightforward to do once we
make the decision to switch. I assume the various packages will create
GNOME 2 branches, so we can leave the sgml on the old 1.x branch and
begin to make GNOME 2 changes of this sort on the new branch.

> 
> 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.
> 

So would this be the version of ScrollKeeeper that would release with
GNOME 2, or do you plan to do an earlier release using libxml2? Does
this also mean that the target for index support is GNOME 2?

> Finally some questions related to 1-2.
> 
> Do we have any idea how to develop the libxslt
> based converter and who will do it? 

I will be happy to work on this - it ought to be straightforward - but
we also need the assistance of a real hacker. :-)

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

Even if our current gnome-db2html2 is on life support, we need to have
a hospice plan for making its last days as comfortable as possible,
since it will be with us, it appears, until the release of GNOME 2. I
have a number of rendering bug fixes already completed - just need to
get them reviewed and checked in - and we still need to make a
decision about whether to convert it to DV's sgml parser. I would like
to see this happen if the entity difficulty Laszlo mentioned is solvable.

Cheers,
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h)
jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/