Re: silly question

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim styx net>]

On Fri, Nov 19, 1999 at 09:03:09AM -0600, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

>> I have a silly question(tm).  Any chance we'll have man pages for the
>> gnome apps?  I find it tedious to run a help browser to look up
>> documentation.  Case in point, Xman has been around forever.  Does anybody
>> actually use Xman?  I've never to do this day used it.  It's way too much
>> action to call up the help browser and type in the command.
 
> We do have some vert bare documentation for the applications.
 
> What I would like to see is (as I have many times pointed out in the
> past) is a native DocBook to man and html conversion tool.
 
> We do have the tools to do this.  We just use gnome-xml to load the
> SGML file, and then we do walk the resulting tree and we have to dump
> it into some file format.
 
> Now, the idea of this project would be to be able to use this as a
> filter, or as part of a larger engine.

There's some code to do this in Conglomerate ( http://www.conglomerate.org/ -
very unfinished), the XML project we're doing here at Styx. We made a small
transformation language which we use right now to transform very abstract
structural XML markup into very graphically oriented TeX and HTML. I think it
should be up to most tasks, at least when it's finished, which will be in a
month or three. At that point, it will also have a nice graphical XML editor,
and lots of other goodies.

However, we don't use gnome-xml, we're very close to finishing a validating
XML library based on the RXP parser. Validation is really necessary to do
transformation in a safe and sane way, if not you can run into a lot of
strange output.

Feel free to take a look at the project, though, and anyone who's interested
can send me a mail to get more info, help out, etc. It's mainly being
developed in-house right now, but feedback and help is always welcome.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - styx research director - joakim@styx.net
FIX sysop - FIXmud admin - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer