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Message-ID: <009801c1fca3$943b7d40$670004c0@PC103>
Reply-To: "Nicola Ken Barozzi" <nicolaken@apache.org>
From: "Nicola Ken Barozzi" <nicolaken@apache.org>
To: <forrest-dev@xml.apache.org>
References: <A46F514C-6746-11D6-8FE0-0030653FE818@mac.com>
 <02051513513504.10986@igacer>
Subject: Re: translation of document-v10 -> v11 DTD
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 08:33:23 +0200
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From: "David Crossley" <crossley@indexgeo.com.au>

> I have taken the liberty of bringing off-list discussion
> back to the list ... (my comments are below).
>
> Diana Shannon wrote:
> > Steven Noels wrote:
> >
> > > David and I are actively doing some more Forrest-work, as you might
have
> > > seen, and are readying the v1.1 dtds in the mean time. We could use
XSLT
> > > to do automatic translation from v10->v11, but that will obviously
mean
> > > nobody will ever care about using the new dtds... what are your
thoughts
> > > on the transition process?
>
> With such powerful tools, we have no need to do it by hand.
> In fact it will be far more consistent to do it by stylesheet and
> by batch. The translation stylesheet could then remain as
> a tool for users to translate their own v10 documents.
>
> The transition process should not be done behind-the-scenes.
> Of course, we could easily allow v10 to continue and just
> add an extra transformation step to the Cocoon sitemap. Yes
> that would create the "not care" situation that Steven mentions.

At Avalon many devs want to keep the v10 format because it's compatible with
Anakia.
I've already done a simple Forrest2MAven conversion in Centipede's Forrest
Cent, which I want to put here ASAP.

Currently we have had a very hectic moment at Krysalis, but I think that
beta 3 will come out very soon.

I will make Forrest use that just after it, if you don't mind.

Oh, BTW, Keiron from Fop and Tom are our new committers for charting stuff.

Keiron has "donated" very cool charting stuff, so Cocoon will have it very
very soon :-)

> > Clearly, new contributions should be based on v11. Why create additional
> > work for ourselves down the road? I threw up what I had now, based on
> > v10, because I'm feeling under pressure to show something. I've factored
> > v11 into my draft dtds, for howto, tutorial, snippet, etc.
>
> (Diana is talking about the excellent new docs in Cocoon.)
> You cannot mix document types. The Cocoon sitemap is
> applying stylesheets which expect v10 content in all xdocs.
> I think that all Cocoon documents will need to be converted
> as a once-off batch process, along with corresponding
> stylesheet and sitemap modifications. After that, yes, any
> newly contributed doc should be v11.
>
> I wonder if there is another possibility which could allow
> mixed document types during an extended transition process.
> Can the stylesheet document2html.xsl be changed to detect
> the DTD version, or is that information gone from the pipeline
> once the XML instance has been parsed? We would still
> need to encourage transition to and use of the v11 DTD,
> but in this way the stylesheet could cope with both.
> On reviewing my comment i see that this could just introduce
> another issue with cumbersome stylesheets.
>
> > I want to complete a global edit of all existing docs, in the near term,
> > mainly to clean up embarrassing grammar and typos. Whoever does this
> > (I'm happy to participate) could convert them to v11, one by one. After
> > the job is complete, perhaps we should remove v10 from the dtd
> > directories in the repository?
>
> I do not think it is good practice to remove the old DTD.
> It must stay, otherwise users will suddenly have broken
> documents in their projects. Worse still they will have
> no way to transform them because Cocoon will break
> when it cannot find the v10 DTD.

But not mix them.
They should clearly tell Forrst the version in use.

> > I think v10 -> v11 is ok for other Apache projects. I think we
> > should expect Cocoon to be current...
>
> Absolutely, it must be a shining example. We need the
> v10 -> v11 transformation for all projects including
> Cocoon and also for users' own work which is based
> on Forrest/Cocoon.

+1

> > > With the v11 dtd, we got rid of the stupid s1/s2/... and named them
> > > sections instead, and another thing I'm still thinking about is
> > > introducing a proper title element for sections. Apart from that, the
> > > dtds are mostly identical, if not of course for the modularity of the
> > > v11 versions.

Yes.

One point: in Centipede we already are using v11, and now it's being
changed...  :-(

If we change them, we should label them -dev or change version number IMHO.

--
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nicolaken@apache.org
            - verba volant, scripta manent -
   (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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