[Bf-docboard] Interest in XSLT Style sheets for building HTML docs?

[Ted Schundler]

I've been experimenting some with XSLT & DocBook (for non Blender
related reasons). I was wondering if you guys are interested in
improving the HTML documentation. Using the DocBook XSL Stylesheets (
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/ ) it's fairly easy to
customize the building of the manual -- without having to edit LISP
code like with the DSSSL stylesheets, but rather just overriding a few
templates.

For example, to test my ideas on the Blender DocBook sources, I wrote
an override for the building of the authors list to present them as a
comma separated list, rather than the bug list with h3 tags that it is
now. (Right now, getting to the TOC take a lot of scrolling, and as UI
people will tell you, scrolling is something to be avoided as much as
possible.)

The test result (index only uploaded - none of the rest of the
content) is here: http://astro.scu.edu/~ted/oss/blender/docbook/htmlI/
and the xslt style sheet I used is:
http://astro.scu.edu/~ted/oss/blender/docbook/xsl/html-chunk.xsl

Though, since the docboard has been around for awhile, is there a
reason nobody has worked on improved stylesheets? i.e. to not compete
with the printed book or avoid extra web traffic?

If other improvements are desired, I could potentially write the
necissary XSL templates to do so. I have some ideas for improving the
navigation bars on the top & bottom. But they're a little tricky, and
I might not get around to them by the 2.37 release. (unless it ends up
taking over a month, in which case maybe.)


Ted Schundler
(SpookyElectric on IRC / SpkyElctrc on Elysiun)