Re: A new online publishing tool for Texinfo documents.

On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 16:02:00 -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> FYI, my response follows.
>
> Date: 22 Nov 2003 20:50:39 +0000
> From: Nic Ferrier <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected],
>    [email protected], [email protected]
> Subject: A new online publishing tool for Texinfo documents.
>
> Bob Chasell and I have been discussing a new way of making Texinfo
> available online. I am planning to build what we have discussed over
> December.
>
> This message has been sent to all interested parties.
>
> The aims of the new system are to make a web based info reader that
> would be as good as the console based Info reader and that can be
> used by people with slow Internet connections and free software web
> browsers (Mozilla, Galeon, etc... as well as Emacs/W3, Lynx, etc...)
>
>
> Our plan is to do this:
>
> 1 alter makeinfo --xml so that it splits the XML by Texinfo
>   nodes. The --no-split switch will cause the existing output (or
>   maybe add a new switch for the new XML output?)
>
> 2 write an XSLT stylesheet that transforms the chunked XML into
>   specialized HTML;
>
>   the specialized HTML will include Javascript to emulate Info
>   navigation, index lookups, etc...
>
> 3 write a CGI script that will lookup a regular expression in the HTML
>   files and return either a list of hits or the HTML file containing
>   the Nth hit (N being an optional argument supplied to the CGI
>   script)
>
> 4 write a shell script for linking all this together, and possibly to
>   auto-magically install the produced files into an Apache webserver
>   (other webservers to be supported as and when I have time).
>
>
> The shell script(4) will be dependant on a tool called xsltproc which
> comes with the GNOME libxsl library and is quite commonly available
> on free software machines. xsltproc runs on all free operating
> systems and also some non-free ones such as Windoze (but obviously we
> don't care much about those  /8-)
>
>
>
> I personally don't think this will deprecate the existing HTML output
> from makeinfo because that has good support for ALL browsers.
[...]

It's not exactly the same thing you're trying to accomplish, but you may find 
some of the work I've done around the GNU documentation in texinfo interesting:

  http://mefriss1.swan.ac.uk/htmlhelp/php/
  http://htmlhelp.berlios.de/web/php.php
  http://htmlhelp.berlios.de/books/source.php

This is still work in progress, but it already fullfills most of my
daily needs of a HTML based online help system.

Jose Fonseca

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