Re: Publishing HTML

[Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth sun com>]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for responding, I'd like to come back about some of the
points you made.

>> 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 -

I think we must make the source _available_ to be open; I hope
that GNOME will be a run-away success and so attract people who
want to use GNOME because it's a better desktop, not to hack on 
GNOME itself (or its documentation), so they just want help
to be fast and, well, helpful!

>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!

I can see that shipping source and pre-render format would increase the
size of the distribution.

>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.  

Having a metadata-rich distribution format that could be rendered
by a standard browser we could ship with GNOME would be great;
it looks like that's a little further out than we would like.

>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.

I agree; I'm a little concerned that I have to fire up Nautilus
if I want to read some help (unless we were to write a plug-in for
Netscape...), but Nautilus keeps getting (slowly!) faster.

>Its all the odd history that is GNOME.

History is always odd!

Colm.