Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Interactive reading

[Joachim Ziegler <ziegler at algorilla dot de>]

Am Mittwoch, 11. September 2002 19:28 schrieb Sebastian Bergmann:
> Joachim Ziegler wrote:
> > I wonder whether there is a similar mechanism for DocBook.
>
>   I'm working on a system like this based on DocBook and PHP. I want to
>   offer the same "interactive reading" experience to the readers of my
>   upcoming book.

this sounds very interesting.

it should not be too hard to built such a mechanism:

1) there should be an extended XSLT-DocBook-stylesheet that - after
 processing a para/simpara/sect1/... - additionally outputs an href-link to a
 CGI-script into the final HTML-output.

this link contains the id of the para/simpara/sect1...

this assumes that every commentable para/simpara/sect/... has a valid
id-attribute. (in a later refinement, the DocBook-DTD could be extended to
hold an additional "commentable"-attribute for block-level-elements)

2) whenever the script is activated, it presents an html-<form> to the reader
(with at least a <textarea> for the comments in it.) after the reader has
input his/her comments, the script searches in the HTML-file for the
corresponding href-element (maybe with a little help by an anchor-comment)
and inserts the HTML-formatted user comments at this position.

i'm not very experienced with XSLT-sheets. so if someone is willing to do 1),
i'll be willing to do 2).

in this way, you can have your documents read *and* commented online.
doesn't that sound nice?

greetings,
joachim

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