[Mono-docs-list] MonkeyGuide and Monodoc futures.

Joshua Tauberer tauberer@for.net
Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:56:59 -0500 

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
>     I want to move Monodoc to use Mozilla instead of GtkHTML so we can
> start using CSS and remove all the hacks on our code that does css-like
> transformations into HTML.

There's still the issue of not being able to override how Mozilla loads 
up resources (css, images, etc.) that aren't in the file:// scheme.  (I 
didn't look further into it after mentioning this last time, though I'm 
still sure it's not possible.)  If pages are going to have any images, 
the images have to be available directly on disk for Mozilla to be able 
to load them, not compressed in an archive.  Monodoc would have to 
extract the images to /tmp on the fly and mangle the URLs in the pages.

>     The Monkeyguide has been stagnating for a while.  We had Shane
> copy-edit parts of it, but he is not involved in the project, so the
> contents are very likely inaccurate.

If Monkeyguide picks up, I can do some copy-editing.

>     Am considering whether it would be a good idea to move the content
> into the Mono Wiki, namespacing it with `Guide:' just to get organized,
> and then implement a Monodoc provider for plain HTML pages and ship with
> Monodoc the contents from the Wiki (extracted in some form, yet to be
> determined).

Using XSLT for the Monkeyguide would be a really good idea.  It would 
make it easy to format the contents for Monodoc and for the web.  A page 
of Monkeyguide could look like:

<Monkeyguide>
   <Title>How To Run Mono</Title>
   <Body>
     <p>Here's an example program:</p>
     <SourceCode Src="path/to/external/source.cs"/>
   </Body>
</Monkeyguide>

No need to keep the TOC updated in multiple places, or to have example 
source code repeated, etc.  The documentation for the company that I 
work for (during the summer, etc.) is all done this way, and it's worked 
out very well.  It lets us generate Microsoft compiled help (CHM), HTML 
for the website, and PDFs (via FOP) all from the same documentation files.

I'll set up the basic system if you agree it's worth trying that way.

-- 
- Joshua Tauberer

http://taubz.for.net

** Nothing Unreal Exists **