About the Xtal Website

These web pages are composed of a mixture of DocBook webpage (website-full.dtd) and several DocBook books (docbookx.dtd 4.2). A customised version of Website was used to embed these books within the DocBook Website framework.

The individual source XML documents and target HTML which comprise the entire website are organised and arranged hierarchically according to a handcrafted autolayout.xml file. In addition, a handcrafted olink database permits cross references between the various webpages and book sections etc.

Parsing the autolayout.xml file it is possible to determine the dependencies of the various target HTML documents and how they relate to the source XML documents. This allows automation of the HTML website building process via a Makefile. In contrast to the original DocBook website, the customization used here requires every document to be built separately.

Finally all HTML pages are built from the source XML by applying eXstensible Style Language Transformations. This automatically builds the navigation tables within each document and applies them uniformly across the entire Xtal website. Cascading Style Sheets also permit easy modifications of style across the entire site.