Re: Documentation output

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Subject: Re: Documentation output
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 13:51:21 -0400

Hi Eric,

At 07:46 AM 6/23/2003, you wrote:

<documentation>
  <topic>
     <title>First Topic</title>
     <content>content here</content>
  </topic>
  <topic>
     <title>Second Topic</title>
     <content>content here</content>
  </topic>
  <topic>...
</documentation>
I'm wanting to display this content in IE6.0 in relatively standard help format--with the left frame containing the contents (i.e. a list of all of the titles as hyperlinks, a TopRight frame with the Title of the currently selected topic, and a BottomRight frame with the content of the currently selected topic. I'm wondering if there is a good way to do this on the fly, or if I should transform this one file into multiple XML or html files (e.g. contents.htm, First Topic.htm, First Topic header.htm, etc.)...at which point getting the right material into the right windows is a standard html issue.

Well if you want frames in your output, the requirement is implicit that you'll need several output files, contents.htm etc. (Whether you break up your main copy into several files then becomes an HTML design issue.) So this does boil down to mapping the output of your transform to several output files.

Most XSL processors now contain extension functions to create several output files from a single transformation; even if you can't do that there are workarounds to the same effect. It generally can't be done client-side (in case that's what you mean by "on the fly"), but it can be done dynamically by a server-side engine in, say, Apache Cocoon or a similar environment, if necessary.

So the answer, I think, is that the latter is perfectly standard procedure.

Cheers,
Wendell

Thanks in advance Eric : ) p.s. It's been a year and a half since I last had a project that let me use XSLT with any depth, and even then, I was somewhat stumbling, so answers at the XSLT for Imbeciles level would be great.
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Current Thread
Documentation output Eric K Taylor - Mon, 23 Jun 2003 07:48:19 -0400 (EDT) Wendell Piez - Mon, 23 Jun 2003 13:57:37 -0400 (EDT) <=

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