[gnome-love] New Transformations in Yelp

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

I've been hyping this for a while, so it's time to show something off. 
I've created shiny new XSLT to do the DocBook to HTML transformations
for Yelp.  The XSLT basically works for most of DocBook that is used in
GNOME docs, but there's a ways to go still.  I've branced Yelp for the
new code.  The new branch is transformation-playground.

Why the branch?  Well, there are things that just don't work.  I want
room to screw things up for a while, but still be able to have stuff in
CVS.  People have been asking to see the new XSLT.  Plus, the changes
have been getting dangerously big to keep only on my machine.

If there's anybody who knows XSLT and is looking for some low-hanging
fruit, there are about 100 DocBook elements that aren't supported but
should be.  They're all conveniently marked with a FIXME in the code. 
Most of them aren't hard.  They're just time-consuming.  Please don't
just commit to CVS.  I'd like to look over changes before putting them
in, to make sure they don't slow things down.

A translation infastructure is in place in the XSLT.  I need to polish
it up and make it work with intltool.  Help on the intltool portion
would be appreciated, as I'm having a rather hard time figuring out a
way to get plurals to work well.

I'm going to try to rip out yelp-reader and pull all the transformations
(including man and info) in-process.  There are some huge advantages to
doing this, including still more speed improvements.  If this can be
done cleanly, it should be possible to library-ify the transformation
code, which some people have expressed an interest in.

I'm afraid some of the rendering looks off.  While developing the XSLT,
I was looking at the output in Mozilla (well, Epiphany).  It turns out
that gtkhtml doesn't like a whole lot of the CSS.  There's been talk
about using Gecko for Yelp.  Help would be appreciated here as well.

If you don't have time to write code for Yelp, but still want to help
out, then please feel free to run this stuff from CVS.  The new XSLT is
bound to have bugs (beyond just the unimplemented stuff), as DocBook is
absolutely huge, and mostly impossible to get right.  Transformation
bugs are usually easy to fix, but sometimes they're hard to find, as
they may only appear on one document doing something obscure.  Testing
would be a huge help, and it's easy to do.

These new stylesheets are also built to be able to chunk to seperate
files cleanly, so they can easily be used to create HTML for the web. 
In fact, the file chunking will probably work better than the Yelp
chunking, since that's how I developed them.  I've been promising an
automated docs builder for a while.  It was blocking on this.

Feature freeze is in exactly three months.  Please help out, or I might
have to give up sleeping.

--
Shaun