2001-09-25 03:30:10 +00:00
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Hopefully this gives you a general idea of how ScrollServer works. You'll have
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to read up on ScrollKeeper as well to understand how the two work together.
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If you would like to help develop ScrollServer, there are some bugs listed on
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the SourceForge project page you could look into, or write me if you want to
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develop a new feature.
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david@lupercalia.net
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Standards Compliance
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--------------------
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One goal of ScrollServer is to provide a completely standards-based
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implementation to further the use of standards on the network. It is built using
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the most recent W3C recommendations. Please read them if you want to hack any of
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these technologies.
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XLink 1.0 (W3C Recommendation)
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XMLBase 1.0 (W3C Recommendation)
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XPointer 1.0 (Last Call Working Draft)
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ScrollServer and ScrollKeeper have the potential to become a complete
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distributed information database based on the latest XML technologies for
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creating richly linked data.
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It is only recently that Linux documentation has started to move seriously into
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XML, allowing projects such as this to exist. Thanks to all the hard work people
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have put into creating good documentation for Linux. Hopefully ScrollServer will
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make it easier than every to access that documentation.
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Server Process
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--------------
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2001-09-23 17:32:51 +00:00
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The server process is entirely in Python and makes use of the xml libraries.
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All html files are generated using xsl stylesheets (XSLT) and formatting is
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performed with a css stylesheet. There is a single stylesheet right now, but I
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want to allow the user to select the stylesheet they prefer.
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2001-09-25 03:30:10 +00:00
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The HTTP server is based on SimpleHTTPServer, a python library.
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Document Processing
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-------------------
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2001-09-23 17:32:51 +00:00
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Internal pages are generated from xsl stylesheets. The documentation itself is
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generated from DocBook SGML and XML sources and xsl stylesheets, but eventually
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it will have to support man pages, info pages, and other formats.
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Documents in html are served, but they look different from the DocBook documents
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because we don't generate them ourselves. There is no navigation bar on the top,
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for example, and they don't use my stylesheets. There is a bit of ad-hockery
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involved in serving documents that are physically distributed through a common
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uri scheme so they appear to be part of a single tree.
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There is no support for processing documents that are stored remotely. That's a
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good todo item for somebody.
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2001-09-25 03:30:10 +00:00
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Searching
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---------
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There is currently no search functionality. I could use one of the existing html
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searching engines, and might have to to support html sources, but more powerful
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searching should be possible someday using a DocBook aware search engine.
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2001-09-23 17:32:51 +00:00
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2001-09-25 03:30:10 +00:00
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A huge problem in all help systems is finding the needle in the haystack that
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will answer your problem. So, the search engine has to have a big focus to make
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ScrollServer an indispensable tool on your desktop.
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2001-09-23 17:32:51 +00:00
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