Re: [docbook-apps] Website: indexterm, index?

[Denis Bradford <denis dot bradford at verizon dot net>]

Well I'm now generating an index for my Web site - it's actually a hybrid of Website and DocBook indexing. If you're curious, you can see my working example at www.ivanmoravec.net/siteindex.html .

Since my name is not Jeni, I quickly hit a wall trying to do a pure xsl solution (merging the indexes from the different Web pages.) Also, my site is cobbled together from several Website layouts, so 
a solution based on a single layout would not work.

My strategy was to include all the pages in a DocBook file and transform it. Voila, the index structure for my entire site! Of course, the links don't work on my WebSite pages, because each 
transformation generates different ids. I was able to fix the Docbook link targets in place, after matching each Docbook index term to its WebSite counterpart. I automated all this with a small chain 
of make, perl, and xsl scripts. It takes 1.5 - 3 minutes to rebuild my site and index, depending on the number of changes.

I've been running it for several weeks now for a while without a hitch, but I won't post the gory details because it's a hack. I'm not even sure how useful others think it is to index a web site. But 
the general problem of merging docbook indexes might be of interest to some, and who knows, the ugliness of my approach might inspire a more elegant solution.

> Bob Stayton wrote:
>
> > Well, there's good news and there's bad news.
> >
> > The good news is that index and indexterm are permitted inside a webpage
> > element whose DOCTYPE is website-full.dtd, and they do validate.  I just
> > tested it.  I'm not sure what's going wrong when you try it.
> >
> > The bad news is that they don't do what you want them to do, which is 
> > create
> > an index for your website.  You have to keep in mind that each webpage
> > document is a separate XML document, and it is processed as a separate
> > document.  That means the scope of an index can be no larger than one
> > webpage document. In order for the index to cover all your webpages, they
> > would have to be included as children of a larger container document 
> > that is
> > processed all at once. But that isn't how Website works.
> >
> > As it currently ships, Website can't collect index entries from the 
> > set of
> > webpage documents and generate a sorted index.
> >
> > Bob Stayton
> > Sagehill Enterprises
> > DocBook Consulting
> > bobs@sagehill.net