Re: Links in DocBook XML

Peter Flynn wrote:

> Steven T. Hatton wrote:
>>I have been carrying on a discussion with some folks on the DocBook
>>mailing list regarding the use of XML and CSS, without any XSLT
>>transformation to XHTML.
...
> Quite how Netscape, Mozilla, IE, Opera, and the rest have dropped the
> ball so badly is not clear, but it is utterly inexcusable that ten
> years after the technology was in daily production use as a plugin,
> we still don't have anything even remotely near it in a production
> browser (with the exception of DocZilla, of course, which is based
> on the same technology [Synex] used in Panorama).

Do you mind if I bring up a correction here, albeit being a bit late :-)

The Synex thing has confused people before, too. That's probably because of
Citec's past with Synex and its Synex-based browser, MultiDoc Pro. However, it
was exactly because Synex disappeared from the market why DocZilla is _not_
based on Synex technology. Hence, Citec had to build another browser based on
another technology to support their SGML browser option, and the decision was
to start from the Mozilla codebase.

Currently, DocZilla is pretty much Mozilla Navigator with SGMLish twists. It
uses the standard Mozilla Gecko layout engine to display SGML using CSS (or
CSS2-ish, as implemented by Mozilla.org) as the styling language. But to load
and parse SGML, it embeds OpenSP (the reincarnation of J. Clark's SP parser,
used in nsgmls) which is a strictly validating SGML parser with full support
for DTDs and entity resolution through catalogs. Together with a few SGML/XML
specific features, like support for commonly used subset of HyTime, you can
probably call it a true SGML browser despite the fact that it isn't written in
the 90's and not based on Synex :-)

 * * *

ObTopic: You can do live DocBook easily with DocZilla, including links. In
fact, the online reference manual for DocZilla is just one big collated
DocBook XML file which is simply viewed in a new window when the user selects
it in the "Help" menu. We turn DocBook's ULINKs (URL references) and LINKs (ID
references) into real hyperlinks using HyTime clinks. DocBook allows insertion
of the critical HyTime attributes into the DTD simply with a few helpful
parameter entity definitions. There's no hard-coded DocBook support in
DocZilla, as we can do it by parameterization.


br,
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                            CiTEC Information, Service Development