The brave (slow, buggy) new world of XML

Some time ago I decided to write the new netfilter.org project homepage in docbook-website XML. I thought (and still think) that this was _the_ way to deal with HTML. Have some nice XSL's, generate XHTML and put all formatting information in CSS.

However, after trying to use more and more advanced functions, I have to admit that this is far from being easy or documented in any way. I didn't even manage to get the XBEL example for docbook-website running. xsltproc would return 'No template found for xlink'. I tried to find any information on the web if xsltproc did at all implement xlink. No way. All I managed to find out is that libxslt/libxml2 did in fact implement xlink, but no information if xsltproc took advantage of that.

In the end I found out that using Xinclude seemed to work. Great. Now all I need is the netfilter link collection in XBEL format