[Phpgroupware-docteam] Yes I said something Crazy about the manual

[Josh Miller]

Id apreciate the server access.  I used to have a firewall I ran tests on, 
but it went in May.

I think Seek3r has decided to come up with a list of REQS for the inline 
docs.  Hopefully he will ge that done this evening, and we can mold what is 
in the CVs and what you have around them.

Yeah, well about the SGML->(online) Documentation.. its a long one but here 
goes. Seek3r wants the documentation to be portable, so it can be viewed 
outside phpGW by external servers and client.(specificly I don't have 
examples)  the API has functions to enable the XML functionality without all 
the extra compiled dependencies, I don't know how this is in performance. 
Requireing that external developers build docs in SGML and then compile to 
HTML for help is just going to cause peopel to just create the html and skip 
the docbook part, they care about the way it looks, not with it fitting into 
the grand scheme.  Help Searches would be easier to implement if the data 
was tagged.  I was arguing that any processor time, on what would be static 
data, is too much processor time, but I think the overhead on this would be 
low enough not to matter.  But I guess we aould need to see it to know for 
sure.


> What I was envisioning was sort of a php wrapper that created the >manual 
> directory tree on the left side and on the right side displayed >the html, 
> that way it's not linking to the html, but pulling it in to >the php.

That was my origonal idea basicly. and my understanding of yours, but I can 
see some longterm advantages of doing the docs XML style.  The logic for 
pulling apart the docbook style SGML should be easy to hack out.  So I can 
throw it together and try and get some idea of how reasonable it is to do.

I have some personal feelings from a theory standpoint about all this XML 
standards crap.  Kind of like I did with certian graph theory in an Automata 
class.  It seems that you have some basic XML concept.  and then you add a 
few rulles to how it should be laid out, and people treat it like it is some 
whole other creature.( I know not what we were talkign about).

But I am going somewhere with it.
We could build a simpler XML style document based on the more specific SGML 
format, and have something a bit more easy to parse or display, as HTML 
itself can even be formatted in an XML style.  Actually I had thought about 
this.  Assuming browsers wouldn't try anything funky, we could have custom 
XML tags that would be overlooked by browsers, and be useable for searches 
and feeding the data to off server locations.

- Josh

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