[Mono-docs-list] MonoDoc helpsource improvement

[Ben Maurer]

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 20:00, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> I have to go to dinner, but here are a few comments:
> 
> 	* Am a bit afraid of XSLT, because I dont know it, as most
> 	  on this list know, every time I needed a change, I had to 
> 	  post for help on this list.
Actually, XSLT is very maintainable, and not that hard to learn.
However, it is not right for some things (see below).
> 
> 	  Although the code is great, I wonder if am going to be able
> 	  to maintain it (or whether you are interested in maintaining
> 	  this moving forward, for say a few months).
I think we will have no problem finding mono people who know XSLT.

> 	* I would like all the text inside a section to be "indented".
> 	  That was previously done by adding a table I believe.
NO! NO! You must mean setting a CSS property! (and I hope <blockquote>
didn't even cross your mind) A table (or block quote) is the wrong way
to do this, it should be done with CSS. Tables are just the wrong way to
format text. (watch out, I jump on people who use tables wrongly)

> Also, we got a few patches recently
Talking of other modifications, I noticed that that blah.xml is in the
code. Lets make sure to remove that!

I also have some comments of my own:

      * I think the XSLT file is _way_ too big. Why don't we split this
        file apart? Each of the $show choices should be its own style
        sheet. We can use xsl:include for shared code. 
      * I think each language stuff should not be in xslt. XSLT was
        _not_ designed for programing. However, here, we have a problem.
        Right now XSLT does not implement custom functions (because it
        is just a wrapper around libxslt). Would it be possible to still
        have custom methods with libXSLT? Gonzalo, you wrote the XSLT
        code, comments on that?
      * It would be nice if we could reuse some of the code NDoc has
        created for making help documents. They use a strategy very
        similar to the one this patch has.

-- Ben