Dave Pawson wrote:
Hi Jan. I'm curious what you mean by 'LiveDocs'?
The PHP Manual is written in DocBook. DocBook gives you lots of tags and the conversion is done with DSSSL or XSL, but this has the drawback that compilation can take a long time. Because only a subset of these tags is actually used in the PHP Manual, someone had the idea of doing the conversion from DocBook XML to HTML by a PHP script. This is LiveDocs.
At first, LiveDocs was only meant as a quick viewer for people working on the manual. Because the compilation step is monolitic, when you change one file now, you have to recompile the whole tree. With LiveDocs, you would only need to generate a small XML index file, and LiveDocs is then able to display the requested page, and all relevant links (previous, next, cross-links, ...).
But then more features were added to LiveDocs (search, XHTML compatibility, ...) and now the plans are to do the whole online manual straight from LiveDocs. This would also give extra possibilities like user-specific viewings and fancy things like that.
Some extra links:
- LiveDocs homepage:
[ http://thebrainroom.com/opensource/livedocs.php ]
- LiveDocs CVS view:
[ http://projects.thebrainroom.net:8008/oss/dir?d=livedocs ]
- Discussion notes, see part 4, 'Buildsystem' for the discussion about LiveDocs
[ http://cvs.php.net/co.php/phpdoc/RFC/2003_meeting_findings.txt?r=1.1 ]
- Some info from Goba, the PHP Manual project leader
[ http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.doc&article=969357731 ]
Greetings,
Jan Fabry
