How To... Document a Project - Page Creation |  |
Creating a project home page | ||
A projects documentation is divided into a number of sections, each section being called a book. Each book must have a starting page, one at which new arrivals are pointed. This page can be called anything you like but we will follow conventions and call it index.html
Howeer, we do not write HTML documents directly, we write XML documents and these will be converted to the required format (such as HTML) during the build process. So the file we are to create is actually index.xml. Like all documents that are a part of the documentation for your project index.xml must conform to the document DTD (currently document-v11.dtd). We will initially create a minimal index page, you can always add to it later, create a file with the following content and save it as ./src/documentation/xdocs/index.xml.
If you worked through How To... Start A Project you will hopefully remember that we inserted a couple of files into the ./src/documentation/xdocs folder but didn't examine what they were for. Well now is the time to revisit them.
The first was index.xml and it looked someting like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<document>
<header>
<title>Krysalis Centipede - Demo Application for How To Documents</title>
<authors>
<person id="rdg" name="Ross D. Gardler" email="ross@saafe.org"/>
</authors>
</header>
<body>
<section>
<title>Introduction></title>
<p>This is the home page of the Demo Application for hte How To Documentation of Centipede.</p>
</section>
</body>
</document>
This document will form the main body of our site home page. Notice that this file only contains the actual information you want to display, it does not provide any navigation information. index.xml can contain loinks, however the main site navigation links are detailed in book.xml .
by Ross D. Gardler
