Name	Last modified	Size	Description

Parent Directory		-
data/	29-Sep-2008 16:04	-
docs/	29-Sep-2008 16:04	-
html4strict.py	29-Sep-2008 16:04	4.0K
tools/	29-Sep-2008 16:04	-

Motivation

The HTML Writer module, docutils.writers.html4css1 generates XHTML compatible with the XHTML 1.0 specification.

However, generated documents do not conform to the "strict" variant, as they contain some deprecated structures in order to ensure correct display with deficient browsers.

Solution

A HTML writer, producing XHTML that strictly conforms to the XHTML 1.0 specification.

The html4strict writer module subclasses the html4css1.HTMLTranslator and modifies it to remove deprecated HTML constructs. The output conforms to the XHTML version 1.0 Strict DTD.

A html4css2.css stylesheet provides the standard layout for CSS2-conforming Html browsers (e.g. Firefox or Opera). Alternative style sheets are in the data subdir.

Advantages

Standards compliance in the strictest sense.
Clear distinction of content and layout. The HTML output contains no "hard-coded" visual markup.
CSS style sheets can style almost every aspect of the visual appearance
Field lists are written as definition lists and styled with CSS. This
- improves the CSS-configurability as well as
- reduces the loading time of a document with long field lists.

Files

html4strict.py Hypertext Markup Language document tree Writer, producing strict XHTML,
tools with front-end rst2html_strict.py.
data Style sheets and sample documents including
- html4css2.css stylesheet for CSS2-conforming Html browsers,
- docutils.conf example config file.
docs Documentation and example output, comparing layout variants.

Installation

Place rst2html_strict.py in the binary PATH and html4strict.py in the PYTHONPATH or in the working directory (from where you start rst2html_strict.py).

Usage

Similar to the standard rst2html front end:

rst2html_strict.py [options] [<source> [<destination>]]

The full usage text can be obtained with the --help option.

Some of the described options are special to html4css1 and have no effect in the html4strict version of the HTML writer.

Links

html4trans is a similar sandbox project, a HTML writer producing XHTML that contains enough formatting information to be viewed without a cascading style sheet by a lightweight html browser (e.g. Dillo or the console browser elinks).

Inside A Docutils Command-Line Front-End Tool How to roll your own Docutils front end. (Also see the other API Reference Material for Client-Developers.)

Index of /sandbox/html4strict