[libreoffice-documentation] Re: Getting rid of 'oldref' in the help files

[Jan Holesovsky]

Hi Olivier,

Olivier Hallot píše v So 17. 12. 2016 v 14:54 -0200:

> One thing I'd like to add for evaluation of using XML for the help
> contents in browsers is that,  in my experience:
> 
> *  XSLT (XML style sheets), XPath and XQuery  are another technologies
> to master.
> 
> * An error in a XSLT statement and one get  a blank page or a message
> with very little indications (Firefox)
> 
> * XSLT seems to be an aging technology. Is the industry betting in this
> technology for the future?
> 
> * Rendering XML+XSLT is browser-dependent and is not publicly/widely
> tested by W3C. We may be forced to test the results into a wide set of
> browsers.

Nothing stops us from rewriting the XLST transformation to plain
JavaScript, and handle the XHP files directly via JS if XSLT is blocking
us.  [And this is a reasonably self-contained, and easily testable task:
The XHP -> HTML conversion has to give the same results before and after
the rewrite for all the files.  We've got rid of XSLT in writerfilter
the same way few years ago.]

And maybe we'll eventually end up with using the plain HTML5 directly -
I definitely don't want to block evolution (even though at the moment I
see more drawbacks than gains).

But that's my main point - I want an evolution, not a revolution.  Every
time I hear about "helpcontent*3*" or "let's move to html5", I get
extremely scared, because such claims seem to suggest that we have to
throw away what we have & rewrite everything first, and miss what we
want to achieve in the first place; which from what I know is:

1) add multimedia content

2) make the editing easier

But neither 1) nor 2) have html5 (or a complete rewrite) as a
pre-requisite, for both these goals there is an incremental upgrade path
possible: Improving XHP step by step.

All the best,
Kendy