Re: Stylesheets [was: Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0]

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 02:49:14PM -0600, John Fleck wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 01:24:39PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> > > > We haven't discussed how we should deal with stylesheets, so we should put
> > > > a little thought into this.  What do we want?
>
> > If #2, how would we test to see which stylesheet to use? File
> > location? And what of files not in a predictable location? Fall back
> > to a standard default stylesheet with no project-specific decorations?
> >
> > It would be simpler to go with #1 and have any project-specific
> > decorations specified in the doc. Can we do that?
>
> My initial reaction to this is that it feels "icky", if you'll excuse
> the complicated technical terms. :-)
>
> Possible solution:
>
> Make it is the responsibility of whatever application you are using to
> display the help to choose an appropriate stylesheet. Even the document
> author cannot always say what is correct (for example, there may be a
> variety of text-to-speech transformations that can be done for the
> sight-impaired -- that is where the displaying application comes into
> play).
>
> Now, this means that each help browser needs to have a collection of
> available stylesheets and apply the right one (or a default). For
> example, GNOME help pages, info pages, KDE help pages, LDP pages, etc.
> So we end up needing a catalog system again, a la DSSSL catalogs or
> ScrollKeeper. I don't know enough about ScrollKeeper to know if it's
> suitable for this or not.

This is what I was thinking in the past.  Each document could specify a
stylesheet which should be used to display it.  (eg. GNOME docs specify
they should use the standard GNOME stylesheet, ...).  Probably the best
way to do this would be to use ScrollKeeper/OMF right now.

BTW: Really this isn't quite what ScrollKeeper was made for. So eventually
the OMF metadata should be embedded in the document/DocBook itself. Then
the help browser, or possibly a different library under the browser which
includes db2html3 and other tools for the help browser, would handle
matching a stylesheet to the document.

Wherever the code is placed, the result would be what Malcolm suggests:
The document+OMF specifies a stylesheet by name and then a catalog is used
to register and look up stylesheets.

What do people think about this?

If, as Daniel and John suggest, the stylesheets are fairly standard and
have only superficial differences then we should be fine.  If the
stylesheets changed so much that the way documents are broken into pages
changes then we'd have to make sure that the TOC, indexing, etc is not
broken.  I think we should be fine though, since a given document will
always be processed (indexed, displayed, TOC extracted) with the same
stylesheet.

Dan