Re: Publishing HTML

[Dave Mason <gnome dmason net>]

On 22 Jun 2001 18:38:05 +0100, Colm Smyth wrote:

> Maybe one of the "old hands" on the GNOME documentation project
> could help me to understand why this isn't a good idea!

Its pretty simple... We must ship the source if we want to remain open -
even for docs (which means the sgml and the output). If you want html
you get sgml, html, and images - we had some problems with people
shipping images for *both* the sgml and html... which made the packages
rather large. We then had difficulty of having languages other than EN
including sgml, images, html, images... and the packages grew even more!
The idea that we would move to XML has always been there - with the
intent of having browsers which could read XML (we are getting there)
and our help browser reading it as well. jrb hacked up a simple
conversion tool which somehow became the de-facto for 1.4 - it was not
the intent actually, it was a hack to see what we could do. I still
think that having a native XML read from the browser with XSL as the
style is what we are looking for. Unfortunately Mozilla dropped XSL from
the radar for the 1.0 release.  

It is still an interesting idea to get rid of html altogether simply
because we can do richer searches, etc. with XML - are we 100% ready to
do that? I am not sure. I am sure we should start moving to XML to
create the documents though - we have so much more flexibility opening
up to us with Daniel's great libxml/xsl, plus DocBook will be *only* XML
by 5.0.

Its all the odd history that is GNOME.

Cheers,

Dave