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For in-client transforms, DITA is ideal... Topics are fairly small by comparison. Also, I do things like caching the transform so I only have to get it once -- that helps. Network hits are generally slower than processing, I believe. Michael Kay prefers DocBook to DITA, and he showed that for his docs... I think because of the inherent differences, the DocBook transforms were noticeably slower.
The search uses an XML index file that I generate. It uses open source stemming libs... A cool thing about that is filtering. I build search data with audience attributes the same as I use in the content. So if the system is set to ignore a specific audience, then search ignores it as well.
There were rumors that MS Edge would drop the xslt processor, but they didn't. I think they use Mozilla, and Mozilla still has it. It turns out that with XML as a data transport, people like it... So fingers crossed -- let's hope nobody drops it from the client.
And yes, this implementation is in Angular... Had to do that to port over to our GUI which also uses Angular. The good news there is that our GUI can use some of the same components, and load our doc content into the GUI. We have walk-throughs, and mini help panels that open up on request that use our DITA. And we're about to get regions of content drawn on the surface of the GUI in various places. So we can transform our content into JSON for walk-throughs, or HTML for other types of content.Â
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Chris,
The Turbonomic docs app works nicely. I'm surprised at how snappy it is
to go from page to page, especially if it is transforming XML in real
time to HTML. Also the search is real quick. This, of course, was the
way it was supposed to be way back in the days when XML was going to be
the future of the web. It's nice to see it working. I remember when
Michael Kay came out with his in-browser XSLT 2.0 processor, but never
tried it.
I recall a few years ago when I was keeping track of some of the browser
bugs, that Google Chrome was seriously considering removing the XSLT
code from their browser. But I see it's still there. Is any browser
vendor talking about this anymore? There could not be much audience for
it anymore.
On the search for the docs, how are you doing it? Do you make a
precompiled index?
Also, are you using AngularJS? I see this in the HTML: ng-app="vmturbo.doc"
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