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Old 7th May 2008
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Budel - the Netherlands
Posts: 4,125
Default Why you should write a guide/howto in XML

Several of the howto's/guides I have written I wrote in XML.. You can consider this XML file as a source file.

With a XSLT file you can compile/transform this XML source file into another format. I have one to produce Vbulletin formatting and another XSLT file produces HTML.

Advantage is that you need only once source file.

The Vbulletin version can be pasted into a post in the Guides section.
The HTML version you can attach to the post for downloading. That way people can easily print your HTML formatted guide from a browser.

For example see http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?t=50433 where the first three posts are text formatted with Vbulletin tags. In the fourth and last post you can download the HTML version.

The Vbulletin version has these CVS tags
Code:
$Id: new-iso-itis.xml,v 1.11 2007/06/27 04:41:19 j65nko Exp $
$Id: vbul-html.xsl,v 1.6 2007/06/27 04:49:57 j65nko Exp $
The HTML version has
Code:
Id: new-iso-itis.xml,v 1.11 2007/06/27 04:41:19 j65nko Exp $
$Id: howto.xsl,v 1.7 2007/06/27 01:04:44 j65nko Exp $
Notice the identical CVS tags for the new-iso-itis.xml source file while the *xsl files are different.

Before I write a guide about writing a guide using this method, I would like to have some feedback from others. So if somebody is interested in playing with this stuff then please let me know.
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