Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 17:18:57 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Depending on libxslt Message-ID: <20010802171857.B24850@canyon.nothing-going-on.org>
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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/
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