Re: PATCH: produce xhtml output and get rid of evilsedhack

[Curtis Hovey <sinzui is verizon net>]

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 21:42 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> Attached is a patch for gnomeweb-wml, that replaces evilsedhack with a 
> small XSLT transformation.  This has a number of benefits:
> 
>    1. author pages in HTML, publish in XHTML.  Libxslt's serialisation
>       routines follow the HTML compatibility rules, so the output can be
>       treated as HTML too.
>    2. If the HTML page is not in UTF-8, libxml will transcode it on
>       input so the output will be UTF-8.
>    3. Uses the exslt date functions to output the copyright year, so we
>       don't have to remember to update it each year :)
> 
> Some downsides include:
> 
>    1. if no <meta http-equiv="content-type"> tag is in the source HTML,
>       libxml will assume it is latin-1.

The content should be UTF-8 (or at least it was when I made some mass
updated last year).  Do I need to add the meta tag?  I believe point 2
from above (and the fact that latin1 is a UTF-8 subset) that nothing
needs to be done, save for recent content that might be localized
improperly.

>    2. makes the website build depend on libxml2/libxslt

I don't believe this to be a problem..  Will order realse from the past
year or two suffice?

>    3. is a little more resource intensive than sed (not enormously though).
> 
> (1) was an obvious problem for the translated versions of the Gnome 2.10 
> press release, which I've corrected in the attached patch.  I haven't 
> checked to see if other files are affected.
> 
> While this isn't adding much new right now, it should also make it 
> easier to customise things in the future (it should also result in less 
> of those "optimised for standards" links spitting out lots of errors ...)

We use evilsedhack in foundation too.  Do you anticipate portability
problems if we upgrade all evilsedhacks?

-- 


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sinzui is verizon net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.