[RT] building a page database and a related thought

[Carlos <ca...@cvc.edu>]

Good afternoon:

One facility I would like to see in Forrest is a way to have summaries of
content in one central place so if I'm looking for something I can go to one
place and browse summaries/abstracts before jumping into a specific page of
content if I think that's what I'm looking for.

What this would require is a DTD to define the structure of the summary
page, a way to aggregate the information from different pages and an XSLT
stylesheet to convert it to HTML. What do people think? Is this something
other people would be interested in?

Carlos 


-- 
Carlos E. Araya
---+ WebCT Administrator/Trainer
 P | California Virtual Campus
 - | C/O De Anza College
 G | 21250 Stevens Creek Blvd
---+ Cupertino, CA 95014

email               carlos@cvc.edu
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Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Re: [RT] building a page database and a related thought

[David Crossley <cr...@indexgeo.com.au>]

Carlos Araya wrote:
>
> One facility I would like to see in Forrest is a way to have summaries of
> content in one central place so if I'm looking for something I can go to one
> place and browse summaries/abstracts before jumping into a specific page of
> content if I think that's what I'm looking for.
> 
> What this would require is a DTD to define the structure of the summary
> page, a way to aggregate the information from different pages and an XSLT
> stylesheet to convert it to HTML. What do people think? Is this something
> other people would be interested in?

Excellent idea Carlos. We already have the Table of Contents
(ToC from the side-panel menu and match=doclist in the sitemap).
This just aggregates all of the book.xml files and uses the
labels. Your suggestion would also need to extract the
header/abstract from each xdoc (an optional element).

A new DTD may not be required. The ToC application just
generates a normal xdoc according to the document-v11 DTD,
and the normal documentation pipeline takes care of it.

Perhaps the upcoming replacement for book.xml (Libre)
will simplify this task. Libre was recently discussed
on this list.

--David