-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

>On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Jim Wise wrote:
>> >> Regen (several version updates, and script now generates XHTML 1.0)
>> >How do you verify that? (o)nsgmls?
>> 
>> In principal, by serving it via cocoon (pkgsrc/www/cocoon), which has a
>> very nice server framework for XSLT transformations (XML->HTML,
>> XML->PDF, XML->WAP/WML, XML->anything, really), and a neat architecture
>> for dynamic XML generation / transformation.
>
>I haven't used cocoon yet, it sounds like it does all the conversions via
>interactive requests and on the fly? Do you know of tools to do the named
>conversions for batch operations, e.g. Makefile based?

Allegedly Cocoon 2.0 will include such a tool, though I haven't seen it
yet.  The XML, XSLT, and XSL:FO (XML -> PDF via XSL Formatting
Objects) used by cocoon are the Apache Xerces, Xalan, and Fop packages,
all of which are in pkgsrc/textproc.  Somewhere, I've seen a command
line for these for use with ant (pkgsrc/devel/ant, a java/XML-based make
replacement) -- I'll try to pkg this this week.

It sometimes seems like Apache.org suffers from the `must reinvent
everything' syndrome, though what they've come up with so far is all of
quite high quality....

>Also, have you tried something else then (X)HTML, e.g. DocBook->HTML/PDF?

I've tried a couple of custom document types, as well as RSS files.  
There are examples which come with cocoon for DocBook, too.  Mostly, the
apps I've been building with cocoon have centered around custom doc
types with cocoon XSP (think JSP for XML) doing various form
parsing/JDBC database access/etc, to get a really quick and flexible
approximation of site functionality which would be really hairy to get
to in CGI or even JSP.  But in principle, it should also be ideal for
publishing type tasks -- the type of thing grumpy old me still uses
LaTeX for :-)

>So far Federico and I have focussed on plain SGML->HTML/PS/PDF, but if
>there are usable alternatives, it would be nice to know about them.
>Unfortunately, I'm sort of a newbie to SGML/XML. :>
>I wonder if there's a good reason to use XML/DocBook over SGML/DocBook?

I'm not sure if the difference between SGML/Docbook and XML/Docbook is
as small as the difference between HTML and XHTML -- if it is, it should
be possible to write documents for use with SGML now, but written so as
to be also XML compatible.

For the most part, this should be possible, because XML is really a
stricter SGML with a few other changes, but if there are other changes
between the two DocBook DTDs, it could be more complicated...

- -- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise@draga.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use
Charset: noconv

iQA/AwUBOXvIsS2NgFbJL33VEQJaygCfUGwOn54wvk0ptrg9u9qMXzNujzwAoIUm
+mlN4EyKJz098ykawR1XL24A
=5cBL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----