Re: GNOME 2 tasks

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 08:12:55AM -0400, Patanjali Somayaji wrote:
> On Sun, 2001-09-30 at 23:27, John Fleck wrote:
[...]
> > gnome-db2html3 - Patanjali Somayaji
> >     Develop the SGML/XML->HTML engine used to convert our docs on the
> >     fly for help browser display
> Thought I'd just go into this a little further so everyone can suggest
> improvements / other ideas etc. 
> 
> 1. get support for sections into the xsl stylesheets so that just giving
> the document name outputs a table of contents with correct links. 
> 
> 2. given a section name, properly output that section of the doc, again
> with the right links. 
> 
> 3. Caching issues (this is not a priority for the GNOME 2 release, right
> ?)
> 
> 4. making gnome-db2html3 an independent app (doing this would also be
> better after the GNOME 2 release ?)

Umm .. I would prefer that this was in time for the GNOME 2 release.
Otherwise help browsers that are not Nautilus have to implement the same
functionality.

> > XML conversion - Greg Leblanc
> >     Figure out the steps needed to convert our docs to XML and write
> >     up a how-to. Set up and test the standard app build system to be
> >     used with XML.
> Just a thought - would it be possible to use gnome-db2html3 and some
> other stylesheets 
> to convert documents from sgml to xml (the same way we output html -
> based on my study of XSL, i think its possible ... )

It won't be possible always, since the SGML is not necessarily
well-formed XML.

Also, my understanding is that we are aiming for DocBook-xml 4.1 as our
standard, whereas the GNOME 1 documents were in DocBook-sgml 3.1 format.
Some tags have since become obsolete. Others are deprecated and it would
be good, in general, to remove those as we find them. Some scripts can
acoomplish this if somebody has the time. We probably need to wait for
Greg to convert a couple of non-trivial documents (e.g. the style
guide?) and see where the difficult parts are. I know he's been mumbling
quietly on IRC lately, so I'm assuming the process is not just "push a
button and go".

Malcolm

-- 
I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.