From owner-freebsd-doc Thu Aug 2 11:36:29 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from mail.wrs.com (unknown-1-11.windriver.com [147.11.1.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 07D4A37B403 for ; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 11:36:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk) Received: from nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk ([147.11.46.219]) by mail.wrs.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA19880 for ; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 11:36:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from nik@localhost) by nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (8.11.3/8.11.3) id f72GIvS24901 for doc@freebsd.org; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 17:18:57 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from nik) Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 17:18:57 +0100 From: Nik Clayton To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Depending on libxslt Message-ID: <20010802171857.B24850@canyon.nothing-going-on.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-md5; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="3lcZGd9BuhuYXNfi" Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Organization: FreeBSD Project Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org --3lcZGd9BuhuYXNfi Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Folks, I'd like to add a dependency on libxslt to the docproj meta-port. libxslt is an XML/XSL parsing library, implemented in C, with a companion command line XML/XSL parser. Why XML? Because eventually the docs are going to start moving to XML as the source format, and the stylesheets are going to become XSL stylesheets. This is some time away, but it is on the horizon. More pressingly, XSL will let us do various things on the web site that at the moment we use non-standard Perl scripts for. It also provides a standard mechanism for extracting data from multiple documents and presenting it in one. Three examples that I'm actively working on at the moment. 1. The database for the gallery in www/en/gallery/ can become an XML document, with the various output formats being XSL stylesheets. Once you wrap your head around XSL the stylesheets become much more maintainable -- particularly if you're HTML literate with not much Perl experience. 2. The newsflash announcements can become an XML document. It's then pretty trivial to generate the newsflash HTML page automatically. It's also even more trivial to generate an RDF file -- this is the format used by news 'syndication' sites to share headlines and links, so that it'll be easy to get FreeBSD news headlines on sites like DaemonNews and Slashdot. 3. Once (2) is accomplished then the main index.sgml page for the web site can become an XSL stylesheet. This can then pull in data from the news.xml file, allowing us to do tricks like automatically featuring the top four headlines on the main index page. We could do all this with Perl scripts, and in some cases we already do. = =20 But out Perl scripts are custom to FreeBSD, and require a certain amount of Perl knowledge from anyone that wants to contribute. While the XSL stylesheets will obviously require XSL-fu from anyone that wants to work on them it appears that XSL is going to become a much more pervasive technology over the next few years, and that it is more accessible to less technically minded people than Perl is -- hopefully widening the base of people that can contribute. N --=20 FreeBSD: The Power to Serve http://www.freebsd.org/ FreeBSD Documentation Project http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/ --- 15B8 3FFC DDB4 34B0 AA5F 94B7 93A8 0764 2C37 E375 --- --3lcZGd9BuhuYXNfi Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iEYEARECAAYFAjtpfXEACgkQk6gHZCw343Wq9gCfWO029Rz/DGrINYB9sSiNlui9 osMAoIiMBKbqJ/S65m+5YaiOdeKKviKe =bSn+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --3lcZGd9BuhuYXNfi-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message