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Re: [xsl] XSLT or static site generator

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I should mention too that there are commercial tools that will do dynamic
delivery of HTML from DITA content, such as Titania Software's Oberon
system and several companies have built their own systems for that
internally.

While the base DITA Open Toolkit HTML transform is fairly barebones, I
provide an extension plugin (the DITA for Publishers HTML5 plugin) that
makes it relatively easy to generate full HTML5 web sites by including the
HTML5 theme components as part of the HTML generation process. Basically
it lets you do your Web design separately and then bundle the design
results into the generation process.

One issue that DITA-to-HTML producers often face is having to send the
generated HTML through additional processing done as part of the large Web
site delivery process, which becomes a problem. A lot of the work I've
done recently has been to move the needed processing into the
DITA-specific toolchain.

Cheers,

Eliot
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Eliot Kimber, Owner
Contrext, LLC
http://contrext.com




On 5/2/16, 1:43 PM, "Kevin Veroneau kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxx"
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Thanks Eliot, that is the best answer, and it fully makes sense.
>
>However, I should point out that a static site generator could be based
>on XML/XSLT, and still be user friendly.  I have nicely integrated both
>Markdown, and Highlight.JS into XML/XSLT with no difficulties.  I created
>specific XML tags, which in turn generate the required HTML to render the
>tag contents as either Markdown or Highlight.JS.  It's an absolute
>marvel, and makes writing technical documents a breeze.  The only thing
>missing is an XML editor of sorts to make editing the documents easier.
>
>Eventually I plan on releasing a static site framework based on XSLT,
>which would nicely format XML documents.  I like the fact, that for XSLT,
>there's no post processing required before publication of the site or
>documents.  A static site generator requires all the HTML files to be
>regenerated and uploaded each time.
>
>
>  Original Message
>From:xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Sent:May 2, 2016 9:17 AM
>To:xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Reply-to:xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject:Re: [xsl] XSLT or static site generator
>
>On 5/2/16 9:22 AM, Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Many of the documentation Web sites and online help for the products you
>> know and love are generated from DITA XML, including Oracle, IBM, Adobe,
>> Cloudera, Oculus, Nokia, and many many others (those are just companies
>>I
>> know about personally).
>
>See https://www.staticgen.com/ for a useful list of open source static
>site generators.
>
>DocBook and DITA have both been doing static site generation for years
>(decades in the case of DocBook). I've done production work with
>DocBook, DITA, and Middleman (a Ruby-based static site generator that
>supports Markdown), though I'm not doing anything with doc tool chains
>in my current role. While I really enjoyed writing xslts and appreciate
>the power of semantic markup, I understand the popularity of generators
>like Middleman, Jekyll, Sphinx, etc:
>
>These static site generators support light-weight markup formats that
>don't require (or all but require) an awesome commercial editor like
>Oxygen to be productive. Github in turn supports these formats by
>presenting a rendered view when you browse the repository and rendered
>diffs in pull requests. Even without those features, the lighter weight
>markup formats are easier to read in the line diff tool provided by your
>favorite IDE. Editors are the site of holy wars and asking people to use
>anything other than their one-true editor is often a non-starter.
>
>These static site generators typically have support for web dev
>convenience technologies like Sass (+ Bootstrap), CoffeeScript, and Haml
>to make css and JavaScript bearable and free hipsters from the need to
>write any angle brackets at all. There's nothing to stop you from using
>Sass and CoffeeScript as part of an xslt-based generator, but having a
>kit with all that built in, plus a little server runs locally and
>auto-refreshes in your browser every time you save a file is a
>convenient way to author.
>
>The open source toolkits for DocBook and DITA offer base xslts for
>generating html, but leave it to you to incorporate the other
>convenience technologies.
>
>Regards,
>David

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