Use a css file for the doc

Tue Sep 9 17:10:03 CDT 2003

So which do you want:

 1. keep the old default.dsl file which hard-codes the presentation in
all the output files and makes it impossible for an end-user to modify
it.

 2. use the new default.dsl file which puts all the presentation aspects
in the css file so that the html files don't have a hard-coded look and
feel.

 3. remove the dsl file altogether so that we get filenames of the form
p3552.html and the default look and feel.

Apparently you are supporting 3 by saying:
 * that 1 and 2 make it impossible for end-users to change the look and
feel. I would agree for 1 but not for 2 which specifically makes it
possible to change the look and feel of the documentation.
 * that users who don't like the default DocBook html should write their
own dsl file. In other words, you are forcing users to learn how to
write a dsl file to make any sort of customization of the look and feel.
 * the previous argument invalidates your argument that 2 makes it
impossible for users to customize the look and feel. If option 2 does
not provide the means they need to customize the look and feel, all they
have to do is to write a custom dsl file and they will get whatever they
would be getting in option 3.

> But the big problem is that we screw users that care or they have a
> requirement to integrate stuff into _their_ website.

Obviously we are not screwing them. See above.

> Using the standard tools is the better approach, rather then trying
> to fix them into our tree. If you think the fix deserves a bigger
> audience, it belongs in the DocBook tree.

We are using the standard tools or else I certainly was not aware that I
had rewritten docbook2html. The docbook2html authors specifically
provided options to make it possible to customize its output. Now you
are saying that we should not be using these options at all. Then I
suppose you are against the use of -O2 or -I when invoking gcc too?
You're obviously not and that's because the default behavior of gcc does
not necessarily meets our needs. Similarly, it makes sense to set a
couple of options when generating the html code using docbook2html.

Also you still seem to think that the purpose of the default.dsl file is
to decide the background and text color, what should be in italics or
bold, etc. IT'S NOT!

The purpose of the DSSSL file is to customize whether one will get a
title page, alter section numbering, modify headers and footers, etc.
All color and font settings kind of things is left to CSS as is
obvious when looking at the HTML generated by the docboo2html: most tags
have a CSS class so that one can alter their look by setting the proper
CSS attributes:

><BODY
CLASS="BOOK"                 <--- a CSS hook
BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"
TEXT="#000000"
LINK="#0000FF"
VLINK="#840084"
ALINK="#0000FF"
><DIV
CLASS="BOOK"                 <--- another
><A
NAME="INDEX"
></A
><DIV
CLASS="TITLEPAGE"            <--- another
><H1
CLASS="TITLE"                <--- yet another
><A
NAME="AEN2"
>Wine Developer's Guide</A
></H1
><HR></DIV
><DIV
CLASS="TOC"                  <--- and another
...

All these hooks are there so that people don't have to mess with the
DSSSL to change the look and feel of the pages.

-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                           La terre est une bêta...