Re: DOCBOOK: customizing docbook xsl

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld at sympatico dot ca>]

Hi Bob,

thanks for your very detailed help !

Bob Stayton wrote:

> You'll need to look at several templates to do this:
> 
> 1.  In autotoc.xsl, the "subtoc" named template 
> is the one that generates the actual HTML list elements
> for a TOC.  There you will want to add the TARGET attribute
> to the generated TOC <a> anchor elements to point to your
> main document window.  It looks like you will want
> to modify the look of the TOC as well.

ok, for now I modified the original template. It's so big...
Norm, wouldn't this be worth to be done with a parameter ?
There is now a template 'href.target'. If that became two
templates, one for the 'href' attribute, one for the 'target',
one could easily customize them, without messing with that
huge 'subtoc' template itself.


> 2.  In chunk.xsl, modify the "process.root" template
> to generate the frameset document before any chunking takes
> place.

works fine.


> 3.  You'll probably want to turn off the navigation headers
> and footers that appear on each page, since the left frame
> provides much of that.  That way you don't have to worry
> about trying to link the Home back to the left frame.
> You can do that by making new "footer.navigation" and
> "header.navigation" templates that are no-ops.

I discovered that there is a parameter 'suppress.navigation'
which is set to '0' by default...

> 4.  For your links within your pages to other frames,
> you could add a role attribute on those
> <xref> or <link> elements, and then modify the
> templates in xref.xsl to add the HTML TARGET attribute
> accordingly..

right

> 5.  If your cgi links are all to the same frame, then you
> could use or generate <ulink>s and set the 'ulink.target'
> stylesheet parameter to that frame name.  But that's a
> single global name, and may not work for your purposes.

I think it does.

> Hope this helps.  I'd be curious to see it working,
> and maybe you could contribute a FAQ based on your
> experience.

yeah, will do. I plan to evolve this into a real project,
where this cgi script is a hook into an issue tracker or something
similar, to make this feature really useful. Let's see
where this takes us. I hope to integrate this stuff into
the fresco project site (formerly berlin), so you can watch
the progress. If it is useful in itself, may be it can become
a docbook contribution...

Thanks again for the help !

Regards,
		Stefan