27 Mar 2002 movement   » (Master)

CSS

I'm glad advogato is getting CSSified - the more the better. I recently made oprofile.sf.net CSSified - it has a rather nice pinned menu. All versions of IE make a total hash of it, but seeing as the site displays nicely in Konqueror, Mozilla, Galeon, lynx, w3m, links, etc. and is acceptable even in Opera, I can't say that I care much. It'd be a pity to miss the shrink-to-fit coloured boxes of advogato though.

XHTML and DocBook

Part of the above-mentioned site is auto-generated from DocBook. Originally the source file was DocBook SGML, but there was simply no DSSSL style that could produce valid XHTML.

So I switched to DocBook XML in the hope this would help. After much hassle (there are literally about 5 different sets of packages for this sort of thing, each containing 5-10 different individual packages - and all have different bugs), I managed to get compliant XHTML for the all-in-one XSL style. However I still needed to remove the xmlns attribute which appeared on every tag, because validator.w3.org didn't like it.

Furthermore, I have yet to find a "chunked" style file that has reasonable file names and actually includes a doc type etc. It looks like I will have to fritz around with this stuff some more ...

It's clear to me this area is still pretty immature - as a document author, I most definitely do not want to be pissing around with the stylesheets unless I want to fiddle with the output style. Why can't the tools provide simple, compliant translation ? I would have preferred to know zero about XSL etc. and just be able to write my document.

LyX

The release of 1.2, after much heartache, is close to hand. The GUI independence effort is almost reaching its first complete iteration - my Qt 2/3 port is probably 80% or so complete already. I can't wait to not have to use that xforms stuff again !

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