Re: [Doxygen-develop] strategies for XHTML support

[<do...@ke...>]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 04:00:10PM +0100, Francesco Montorsi wrote:

> I think that the postprocessing of the HTML output will be much 
> simplified if doxygen starts outputting XHTML instead of HTML4, which is 
> not valid XML.

Certainly it should be easier to parse if it is valid XML, if they were
starting from scratch.  The problem is wiht existing translators
expecting the non-valid format.

> Companies doing this kind of postprocessing will eventually need some 
> changes to their scripts but this is probably true after all doxygen 
> releases since the structure of the generated HTML is not granted to 
> remain the same and in fact, most times it changes from a release to 
> another.

I wonder how much it does.  I don't know, I'm not directly in touch with
those places which do that sort of transformation.

> Doxygen cannot continue to produce HTML4 forever (*)!
> Technologies are evolving and the switch from HTML4 to XHTML I think is 
> worth some troubles/regressions.
> 
> It's just that sometimes I think that all doxygen sources should be 
> entirely rewritten and reorganized (with more comments!!) in order to 
> fix all of these errors.

I have had the feeling that what it should be producing is just XML, and
then have back-ends which produce whatever other formats people want
(XSLT could do most of them).

"Rewrite from scratch" is my mantra with almost everything (especially
my own code), but the time and effort to do that tends to be
prohibitive.  Especially when what's there is 'almost' right.

> (*) = I also strongly doubt it produces VALID html4 now; testing it is 
> not easy as doing an HTML4 validation test is much more difficult than 
> doing an XHTML validation test and requires for me to upload file by 
> file the generated output to the w3c validator.

Don't they do a stand-alone validator?  Most people do want to validate
entire sites or at least sets of pages.

Chris C