Re: Detecting stylesheets and DTDs

[Eric Baudais <baudais okstate edu>]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 07:54:15PM -0600, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I recently had a question about how to properly detect if a DTD or
> stylesheet is installed on a machine, and what its path is.  I needed this
> for (1) ScrollKeeper to make sure a given version of the DocBook/XML DTD
> is installed, and (2) for updating the GNOME docs build stuff
> (xmldocs.make) to have a target for building HTML from DocBook/XML docs.
> I'm summarizing an off-mailing-list discussion which followed, in case
> anybody is interested.
> 
> In principal, the DTDs and stylesheets should be registered in the XML
> catalog (see http://www.xmlsoft.org/catalog.html for more info).  In
> reality, only some DTDs are packaged properly and few stylesheets are
> packaged properly, registering themselves in the XML catalog.  After
> discussing the possibilities of circumventing the catalog or having GNOME
> install DTDs or stylesheets properly to guarantee they are properly
> registered, we decided the best thing is to follow the intended use of the
> catalog system.  Thus, we will add a blurb to the configure script which
> uses xmlcatalog to test for the existance of a given stylesheet or DTD.
> If it isn't present, it will fail, explain that the package either isn't
> installed or didn't register with the catalog properly, and link to
> http://www.xmlsoft.org/catalog.html for more info.
> 
> People will have to make sure that their catalog and stylesheet packages
> are good, which will be a bit of work in the short term.  But after
> packagers get these fixed, we will all be much better off.
> 
> My understanding is the RH7.2 is not quite right w/r/t the XML catalog,
> but that rawhide is fine.  I'm not sure of the status of other distros.

This is fine, but there needs to be more information about how to properly 
install the XML catalogs than DV's webpage.  His webpage is written from a 
developer's prespective and has a lot of information about debugging a 
catalog and implementation.  It lacks information about installation and 
setting up the catalog.  I believe if we are to take this approach 
documentation is key.

Eric Baudais