xnav - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

xnav - Construct navigation top and sidebars for a collection of web pages

SYNOPSIS

xnav [ -V ] [ -h ] [ -v ] [ -c (all | (title | base | script | style | meta | link |
object)[,(title | base | script | style | meta | link | object)][,...])] [ -b (rmv | div)
] [ -i ] [ init | make | valid | clean ] path

DESCRIPTION

XNav adds a wrapper with CSS style and top and side navigation bars to a directory tree of
XHTML documents. It also provides a mechanism for automatic construction of XHTML
documents from user defined XML document types, using user suplied XSL.

OPTIONS

init path
Initialise directory path as an XNav website.

make path
Construct the XNav website in directory path.

valid path
Validate XML and XHTML in directory path.

clean path
Clean auto-generated files in directory path.

-V Display version.

-h Display usage information.

-v Verbose operation.

-c Specify the html/head children to include in the output documents. Allowed values are
'all' (the default), 'none', or a comma separated list of element names 'title',
'base', 'script', 'style', 'meta', 'link', and 'object'.

-b Select handling of the body specification in CSS within a html/head/style element.
Valid values are 'rmv', requesting removal of any body definitions, and 'div',
requesting replacement by a top level div element with the same style.

-i Append 'index.html' to top and side navigation directory paths. Primarily useful for
constructing a set of pages that may be navigated as files accessed directly by a web
browser, rather than through a web server.

USAGE

Start by setting up the desired directory structure of the collection of web pages. All
HTML documents should be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, and should have extension .xml rather
than the usual .html. Each directory should have, at least, an index document called
index.xml, and a configuration file called xnav.xml.

The configuration file format is defined in the file xnav.dtd. The top level element is
xnav, with optional child elements directory and file. The label for a specific directory
is usually provided by the label in the referencing directory element in the parent
directory, but may be specified by using the label attribute in the top level directory.
If the index.xml file is not HTML, the type attribute should be set to the name of the
document format, and an XSL template should be provided for handling that type.

A directory element represents a navigation link to a subdirectory, the actual directory
name being specified by the href attribute, and the directory label used in the navigation
bars being specified as the element content. If a directory element points to a directory
not managed by XNav (i.e. into which the build script should not recurse), the enter
attribute value should be 'no'. If the directory is managed by XNav, but is for some
reason desired to be excluded from the side navigation bar, the sidenav attribute value
should be 'no'.

A file element represents a link to a file within the same directory as the xnav.xml file,
and has similar usage to the directory element. If the file is not HTML, the type
attribute should be set to the name of the document format, and an XSL template should be
provided for handling that type. If the file is desired to be excluded from the side
navigation bar, the sidenav attribute value should be 'no'.

Initialise the directory structure at path using the command

xnav init path

creating a directory XNAV in path, containing configuration files which may be edited by
the user. The files head.xml and foot.xml define header and footer HTML added to every
page generated by XNav. The catalog.xml file allows the XML processing utilities used by
XNav to locate the DTD for the xnav.xml configuration files. If the user adds additional
document types for processing by XNav, references to the relevant DTDs should be added to
the catalog file. Finally, the xnavinc.xsl file includes the main XSL stylesheet xnav.xsl
responsible for the majority of XNav processing.

XNav can be extended to process arbitrary XML document types by including additional XSL
stylesheets within the xnavinc.xsl file. If a non-HTML document types is referred to as
newtype in the type attribute, the user should define an XSL template with name newtype
and mode dynamic-template-select. Within this template, the content of the document to be
processed is available at XPath src/newtype.

Once initialisation is complete, and whenever source XML documents are edited, the output
HTML files may be generated using the command

xnav make path

The command

xnav valid path

validates source XML files which contain a DOCTYPE specification. Files that do not
contain such a specification are checked to determine whether they are well formed.

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