Re: xCHM status, usability and Preface formatting question

Hi techtonik,

    I bet you've already noticed some commits to XSL templates. I've

made an update resulting in latest XSL DocBook templates 1.66.1 and xCHM files compile successfully again. Main htmlhelp.xsl was started from scratch again to make it current with latest DocBook XSL sources and keep redundant customizations at minimum. Now it inherits htmlhelp/ DocBook templates instead of operating on it's separate copy of them in htmlhelp-db.xsl.

    Now I'm reviewing and integrating old markup rules into new

template to make upcoming xCHM version look exactly as the previous xCHM 12. It will take some time to do this.

Good. Your contributions are valuable :)

    In version 12 it was one page with a short abstract only. In

version 13 and latest sources there are also credits with authors and editors. This division makes additional expandable "book" in TOC with all bookmarks leading to the same page. I do not know if it confuses users, but for me such division is useless and make manual look more like hardcopy books, where you do not need to look at these pages as long as you don't interested in that kind of information. But that's not true for xCHM version where this attention can decrease usability because frequently accessed information is located among similar graphical markup. I'm writing this with a great respect to all manual developers, editors, authors and contributors, because I think PHP manual is a major part of PHP success on windows platform. That's why I'm asking about what will be the best way to include information about people, who contributed to PHP docs in xCHM version. I have some proposals: 1. Leave as is

      Default way some may easily agree with because of simplicity in
      implementation (which should not be the goal, right?). That way
      we will have structure like
         Preface
           Authors and Contributors
              Authors and Editors
              User Note Maintainers
      as the third item of the manual TOC. Decreases usability by
      adding additional burden for users reading additional book title
      and perhaps contents to locate needed manual part.

I had a hard time to undestand the point. These TOC items are expandable from the Preface hierarchy, and by default they are not expanded. Or am I mistaken? Goba