- OpenACS is a powerful system, with + OpenACS™ is a powerful system, with incredible possibilities and applications, but with this power comes some complexity and a learning curve that will only be atenuated by good documentation. This is what we are after.
- The documentation for OpenACS is + The documentation for OpenACS™ is written using DocBook XML. The reasons why we are using DocBook are explained in more details in the Why DocBook? section. I will add the reasons why @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ In order to separate content and presentation, all OpenACS documentation will be marked up to conform to the DocBook XML DTD - + This enables us to publish in a variety of formats and relieves each contributor of the burden of presentation, freeing him to focus on content and sharing knowledge. @@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ list of elements and use more exotic features in your documents. The list is made up of SGML-elements but basically the same elements are valid in the XML DTD as long as you remember to: - +
Always close your tags with corresponding end-tags and to not use other tag minimization @@ -91,15 +91,15 @@ please e-mail the gatekeeper in charge of documentation.
You can look at some templates for documents (in Docbook XML) in - the sources + the sources for acs-core-docs, especially the Detailed Design Documentation Template and the System/Application Requirements Template.
The documentation for each package will make up a little "book" that is structured like this - examples are emphasized: - +
book : Docs for one package - templating
@@ -120,23 +120,23 @@
sect1-level. These are then tied together in a top-level document that
contains all the information above the line. This will be explained in more detail in a later document,
and we will provide a set of templates for documenting an entire package. For now you can take a look at the
- sources of these DocBook documents
+ sources of these DocBook documents
to get an idea of how they are tied together.
- + Given that your job starts at the sect1-level, all your documents should open with a <sect1>-tag and end with the corresponding </sect1>.
- + You need to feed every <sect1> two attributes. The first attribute, id, is standard and can be used with all elements. It comes in very handy when interlinking between documents (more about this when talking about links in the section called “Links”). The value of id has to be unique throughout the book you're making since the id's in your sect1's will turn into filenames when the book is parsed into HTML.
- + The other attribute is xreflabel. The value of this is the text that will appear as the link when referring to this sect1.
@@ -151,7 +151,7 @@ </sect1>
- + Inside this container your document will be split up into <sect2>'s, each with the same requirements - id and xreflabel @@ -160,7 +160,7 @@ When it comes to naming your sect2's and below, prefix them with some abbreviation of the id in the sect1 such as requirements-overview.
- + For displaying a snippet of code, a filename or anything else you just want to appear as a part of a sentence, we will use the tag <computeroutput>. @@ -170,12 +170,12 @@ <programlisting> is used. Just wrap your code block in it; mono-spacing, indents and all that stuff is taken care of automatically.
- + Linking falls into two different categories: inside the book you're making and outside:
By having unique id's you can cross-reference any part of your book with a simple tag, regardless of where that part is. -
Check out how I link to a subsection of the Developer's Guide:
+Check out how I link to a subsection of the Developer's Guide:
Put this in your XML: @@ -213,7 +213,7 @@ packages-looks, the parser will try its best to explain where the link takes you.
- + If you're hyper-linking out of the documentation, it works almost the same way as HTML - the tag is just a little different @@ -234,7 +234,7 @@ do it, so if you want to start converting your documents right away, start out with the ones without graphics ;)
- + To insert a graphic we use the elements <mediaobject>, <imageobject>, @@ -260,7 +260,7 @@ Put your graphics in a separate directory ("images") and link to them only with relative paths.
- + Here's how you make the DocBook equivalent of the three usual HTML-lists:
Making an unordered list is pretty much like doing the same thing in HTML - if you close your <li>, that is. The only differences are that each list item has to be wrapped in something more, such as @@ -305,7 +305,7 @@ </variablelist>
- + DocBook supports several types of tables, but in most cases, the <informaltable> is enough: @@ -342,7 +342,7 @@ <table> for an example.
- + Our documentation uses two flavors of emphasis - italics and bold type. DocBook uses one - <emphasis>.