If you watch mailing lists and IRC carefully, and you keep your eye out for the word “DocBook”, you’ll see a trend emerge. People like to complain that the HTML you get from DocBook looks ugly. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
These days, you have basically two options for converting DocBook to HTML: Either you use Norm’s pan-galactice all-singing-all-dancing XSLT, or you use mine. Mine don’t provide as many options, and they still lack support for some of the more complex book-oriented stuff, but they’re mighty fast.
People said DocBook was slow, so I set out to prove them wrong. Now they say it’s ugly. So, hey, a challenge. Understand that any amount of prettification necessarily involves dictating style. Try writing HTML without any CSS or other fancy styling stuff. It looks ugly. So the goal here is to continue to make the generated XHTML generic, but to make the default CSS styling nicer. And there’s my long-standing goal of making Yelp do less customization to gnome-doc-utils than it currently does.
So, mockups:
BeanStalk Manual
Working with Beans
Purchasing Beans (includes an admonition)
Bean Storage and Care (includes a program listing)
These are rough sketches, and there are a few problems still. The XHTML behind them is clean, and easy to create from DocBook source. Everything is in the CSS. More to come later.
