Re: [Monotone-devel] Documentation Texinfo XML to Wiki converter

[Philipp Gröschler]

Thomas Keller schrieb:
> The whole xslt thing is basically a test balloon how well we can convert
> the current texinfo source to wiki markup and if this works out well if
> we use this instead of plain HTML files for the website (or even switch
> completly to a wiki manual, if people agree). The reason for this step
> is because makeinfo is rather limited when it comes to HTML output, you
> cannot rearrange things or add certain needed header / footer parts
> easily to it, _but_ there is an XML output available which theoretically
> could be transformed to anything we want. And exactly this is Philipp's
> work.

Thanks for clearing this out ;-) My last mail wasn't really what one
would call creative or informational.

Again, if there are questions, please first take a look at the README
file in the branch I committed. There I tried to sum up my intentions.
Well, at least the important ones.

Zack Weinberg schrob:
> What is *your* vision for this thing?  I don't really understand what
> you have in mind so it's hard for me to evaluate.  I think we would
> prefer to keep the master copy of the manual as part of the main
> sources rather than opening it up to wiki-based editing, but that
> doesn't mean support for more different rendering formats is
> uninteresting -- far from it.

My vision is to get involved in the project in a way that I can help
within my limited spare time/abilities.

The current state of the package is very experimental, just to show a
way how it *could* be done. Besides the possibility of completely
switching over from the Techinfo Manual to Wiki at some day, I rather
thought of a continous one-way process. The documentation would still be
maintained with Techinfo and new versions would be converted to Wiki
format. The respective resulting parts of the Wiki should then be read
only to prevent concurrent modifications which could not easily be
brought back into the Techinfo part.

But that is not my decision. I wanted to show a way how it could be
done, and if there's reasonable demand then I will keep working on it.
So much for the "vision" part ;-)

Daniel Carosone schrieb:
> The great thing about this work is it (begins to) breaks the coupling
> between purpose and style, which means content can be used for
> multiple purposes regardless of style, in turn meaning that
> "unification" doesn't get confused with "markup conversion".
> 
> So, really, yay, and yay again.

I carefully consider this as a positive response ;-)

Yes, XSLT is a nice way to break the border between plain markup and
presentation. I learned to use it about five years ago and I was
astounded by its possibilities. For quite a while I used it for a self
written XML-based servlet engine.

But besides the magic one could do with XSLT there are also a lot of
limitations. The way a stylesheet works and is processed could drive you
easily into madness. At least it has done so a few times with me. And
some things just do not work.

Example: I wanted to give the user the possibility to choose the output
format converter at runtime. The first intended way was to get a command
line parameter into a XSLT variable, which then contains the complete
file name of the converter stylesheet and then use this variable with an
include instruction. So to speak, for dynamically chosing the included
converter stylesheet. That one went wrong. XSLT stylesheets are first
compiled completely and then interpreted. There's no way for such
dynamic and runtime dependent behaviour without external programed logic.


Ah, so much text. I think I should stop here.

Greetings!

Philipp