[docbook-apps] DocBook to XHTML/CSS

["Michael D. Crawford" <crawford at goingware dot com>]

Greetings,

My wife Bonita just redesigned my website to use all valid XHTML 1.0 Strict with 
Cascading Stylesheets.  I have some DocBook XML publications on my site that I 
would like to use the new design.  Is it possible to do this through software, 
so that I don't have to go edit the rendered HTML markup by hand?

The following article was written in docbook and published to HTML with jade and 
the dsssl stylesheets.  Jade didn't include a DOCTYPE but I think it is HTML 
4.0, with all the tag names in uppercase:

Writing Cross-Platform Software - Getting Started
http://www.goingware.com/tips/getting-started/

I imagine that what I need to do is, instead of publishing with jade, to use the 
available XML publishing tools with some kind of stylesheet customization.  I'm 
technically competent and can run the tools on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X, but 
I've always found DocBook's toolchain quite daunting, and don't know where to 
start.  Maybe you can help me out with a clue or two.

This other article, still a rough draft, is written in hand-coded XHTML using my 
wife's new design.  I'd like the above article, and some others, to use this style:

Web Server Log File Analysis with Analog
http://www.goingware.com/tips/log-file-analysis/

In particular, besides needing the published output to be in XHTML, I need to be 
able to specify the class or sometimes the id attributes for some of the 
elements.  For example, on the second page of the above article:

http://www.goingware.com/tips/log-file-analysis/what.html

I quote a snippet of a log file in a white box.  In the first article's second 
page at http://www.goingware.com/tips/getting-started/byteorder.html my source 
code snippets are in a darker blue, in PRE elements with class PROGRAMLISTING.

To fit with my new template, what I'd like to do is have programlisting text end 
up in a <div> element with class "pre_code".  That's just what happens to be the 
class used in my stylesheet.

There is a single stylesheet that will be used for my whole website once I get 
all the pages updated, it is at http://www.goingware.com/index.css

I imagine it will be quite a bit of work to create the needed stylesheet 
customizations.  If I were only concerned about the one cross-platform article I 
would edit it by hand.  But really what I'd like to do is to write all the new 
articles I plan in docbook rather than directly in HTML, so that maybe someday I 
could publish a dead-tree edition of GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks 
(http://www.goingware.com/tips/).  It would not be hard for me to update all my 
existing HTML 4 articles to use XHTML, and then from there there are open source 
tools to convert that into docbook.

I promise that when I have a working solution I'll post here with a summary of 
what worked.

Thanks!

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

    Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.