gnome-db2html3 explained

[Eric Baudais <baudais okstate edu>]

> --- Begin Message ---
> Eric -
>
> First, apologies. It's been so long since I dealt with this I was a
> bit rusty on the details, and my explanation last night was
> poor/wrong. I had to go back to the code - it's been six months since
> I thought about any of this.
>
> gnome-db2html acts essentially the same as xsltproc with a couple of
> important exceptions. For the discussion below, I'll give you the
> equivalent xsltproc commands so you can see what it's doing.
>
> It needs to construct href's with the full path to the doc, not just
> ghelp:docname as I said last night. (If it would be easier or more
> practical to just use "docname" I believe I could rewrite the C to do
> that, but for some reason that I don't remember this was the better
> way to do it).
>
> Because xslt doesn't have access to the filename it's parsing, I feed
> the path and filename in as parameters. That's what:
>
> <xsl:param name="gdb_docname" />
> and
> <xsl:param name="gdb_pathname" />
>
> are at the beginning of gnome-customization.xsl.
>
> It also looks at the ghelp uri: "ghelp:docname?id" looking for the "?"
> and, if it's there, makes a note of the fact and grabs the id.
>
> It then feeds all this stuff as parameters to gnome-db2html in a way
> that's equivalent to:
>
> xsltproc --catalogs --stringparam gdb_pathname /path/to/ --stringparam
> gdb_docname docname.xml --stringparam  rootid id
> [PREFIX]/share/sgml/docbook/gnome-customization-0.1/gnome-customization.xsl
> /path/to/docname.xml
>
> If there is no "?id", it doesn't feed the rootid bit.
>
> I don't know if you've dealt with it, but the rootid parameter in NW's
> stylesheets tells them to only output the bit (sect, chapter,
> whatever) named by the id.
>
> Hope this is helpful. I'm cc'ing myself so I can save a copy. :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> John
>
>
> --- End Message ---