Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] question re: marking index terms

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc cu-portland edu>]

On 28 Mar 2001 17:55:42 +0100, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:
> > Chances are that it's not supported.  gnome-db2html2 has a limited set
> > of functionality that it supports at this point.  I don't expect that
> > GNOME could deploy with good indexes in a release prior to GNOME 2.0,
> > which means that we should be able to do things using XSLT rather than
> > gnome-db2html2, which will give us much more complete functionality than
> > we could hope to provide with gnome-db2html2.
> > 
> >     Greg
> 
> Hm ... I have no idea what XLST is, but I wonder how this approach would
> affect Scrollkeeper and its index extraction. You know Scrollkeeper so
> would you know the answer to this question?

XSLT is XML StyleSheets Language Translations (or something very much
like that).  It's a programming language designed specificly for
transforming XML into another form of XML or another formatted document.
It will be used to replace gnome-db2html2, and probably the db2* scripts
for GNOME authors as we move our docs to being truly XML compliant.
As for how this affects Scrollkeeper's index extraction...  Well, this
depends on a few things which I don't understand yet, so allow me to
think outloud for a minute.  First, we need to agree upon some markup
conventions for our docs.  I don't have enough of an understanding of
indexing, yet, to be able to recomend anything here.  Once we have some
docs with real index terms in them, we need to figure out what we do
with those.  There are two options that I can see.  First, we can ship
just the XML docs, and rely on the help browser and/or scrollkeeper to
generate the index from the docs, and present that index to the user.
Second, we could use a script similar to Norm Walsh's 'collate-index.pl'
to extract the index into an 'document-index.xml' file, and ship both
the doc, and that extracted index.  Of these two, the former makes the
most sense to me.
What I'm really having a problem understanding is how we make the help
browser and scrollkeeper talk together for this index.  Looking at the
first markup that Mary gave an example of, there is no "id" tag for
these index terms.  Without an id tag, I'm not sure how the help browser
would know which occurance of the indexterm to link to.  I think that
this will pose some problems for linking to index terms.  This leaves us
with needing to use markup as shown in the second example.  Please
comment on this conclusion, as I've just come up with it.
Back to how this affects scrollkeeper and gnome-db2html2...
gnome-db2html2 probably doesn't support this markup very well, although
it shouldn't cause it to crash (I believe).  So even if scrollkeeper was
capable of generating an index based on this, the gnome help system
would be unable to utilize said index for the moment.  Moving to XSLT
and support for the complete set of elements and attributes provided in
DocBook is my preferred solution for this, although others may argue to
extend gnome-db2html2 to support this.
Most of what I've said here is GNOME specific, rather than scrollkeeper
general, which may be a problem.  Other projects may decide to use
different markup for indexing, or may make other decisions which add to
life's little challenges.  Does anyone know of a way in which
scrollkeeper could easily utilize both forms of markup for indexing?
Enough from me for the moment, ttyl,

    Greg