Re: Docbook 5.x

I think the process should be something like this:

- Apply your XSLT performance patch.  The patch should be submitted to the next commit fest.

- Wait a while to make sure everyone is happy with the performance. Keep tweaking if necessary.

- Port all DSSSL customizations to XSLT.  Manually evaluate output for quality.

- Switch to XSLT build for official HTML documentation. [milestone 1]

- Convert sources to XML. (There could be substeps here.) [milestone 2]

- Then consider upgrading to DocBook 5. [milestone 3]

Alexander and I continue to work on this path. In the meanwhile we have reached a state where xml files are well formed and valid against docbook 4 dtd - each single file as well as the big postgres_all.xml file. Thanks to Alexander's performance patch all XSLT processes run very fast (the slowest is fo+pdf with 6:30 min).

On this basis I actually work on the HTML generation. But in opposite to the previous steps (where we create identical copies of the sgml files) the new css file is very different from the old one. This results from the following:

• The XSLT process generates other HTML elements and other classes in comparison to the dsssl process.
• XML files are case sensitive. All object names (id, ulink, linkend, zone, ...) are now lower case.
  
• Sometimes the order of elements changed.
• As the previous css file was constructed (some years ago) from three different css files, he contains redundant and sometimes contradictory information. I did a complete review.
  

To get a feedback from the community I have published the resulting postgres_all.html and its pgdoc_online.css file. Please refer to https://github.com/JuergenPurtz/pgdoc_db5/blob/master/postgresql-9.5.3/doc/src/db4_xml/postgres_all.html respective pgdoc_online.css to get the files. Please compare the html file with pages you are familiar with. And remember: the look-and-feel is similar, but far from identical.

Jürgen Purtz