Re: jrb help: XML & HTML

["Rebecca J. Walter" <rjp mail tele dk>]

On Tue, 2001-09-04 at 07:59, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> It looks like we have not reached concensus on whether to support anything
> other than XML, so I thought I'd throw in my two pence...
> 
> We definitely want to support XML as our primary format.  This will give
> us a lot more functionality than HTML.

i know there is a good conversion tool for XML to HTML... but maybe it
would be helpful to generic user to make a front-end for this
conversion.  Unfortunately I lack the skills and time required for this,
but maybe some bored hacker out there could do it.  Then we could have a
menu item for this like "Change help format".  That opens the front end
and the user is asked to what format to convert.  Also it should give
them a file selector so they can convert as many or as few of their help
docs as possible.  (it would be useful if this file selector
automatically opened the docs from a range of standard locations)  Then
the user selects the output format (HTML, PDF, PS).  The smart front-end
then finds out the original format of the doc (in case they pick some
already in HTML), runs appropriate conversion tools, and dumps all the
converted documents into the user-specified (with a suggestion)
directory. 
Just a thought.  
I'm all for shipping just XML if we have a good browser that can handle
it.  It would be great if said browser could handle SGML too for docs
that aren't converted yet (like GIMP. prof hasn't given the go to
convert yet.)  With this front-end the user could easily create docs for
something else if they dislike the browser or want to print a GNOME
manual.