DynaWeb is a web server designed specifically for delivering searchable online books via any web client. For users who prefer to view and search online maunals via a web client, DynaWeb automatically converts full-text indexed SGML files, the same source files used for display in IRIS InSight, to HTML. Since IRIS InSight online books can be quite large, often several hundred pages, the conversion to smaller HTML files is done "on-the-fly" with the appropriate table of contents or content page fragment automatically generated in response to the users' search or link navigation.
DynaWeb is a product of Electronic Book Technologies(EBT) the same company that makes the searching and rendering technology for the IRIS InSight & SGIHelp viewers (used for the online manuals we ship with SGI products). EBT offers a complete line of DynaText viewers and online publishing tools.
DynaWeb enables Web client browsers to take advantage of the full functionality of the DynaText search engine, including support for full-text, wildcard, Boolean, proximity, context, and complex searching. End users can quickly locate relevant information with searches that span multiple electronic book collections. The number of search hits are displayed alongside an interactive table of contents (TOC). Only TOC entries that contain search hits are displayed to end-users, greatly improving the efficiency for searching large collections of electronic books.
To enable Web browsing of large InSight or DynaText books, DynaWeb automatically chunks the document, generating a TOC on-the-fly directly from the SGML structure in the source electronic book. Users can navigate through the TOC hierarchy, selecting only information manageable by the Web browser. Additionally, all hypertext links in DynaText electronic books are converted to HTML links on-the-fly.
DynaWeb supports the de facto standard University of Illinois, NCSA HyperText Transfer Protocol Daemon (HTTPD) features, including ISMAP and Common Gateway Interface (CGI). DynaWeb also supports standard HTTP client authentication, which enables clients to send a non-secure user ID and password (for verification) to the DynaWeb server to prevent people from entering specific areas on a DynaWeb server. For more secure environments, DynaWeb can be integrated with HTTP servers with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) capabilities via CGI.
Using tools available from EBT today, SGI users, software vendors, and OEMs can create and publish complete on-line documentation immediately. Click HERE for more information about EBT's complete line of open, standards-based electronic publishing solutions.
Starting with DSE 1.1, DynaWeb is shipped as a standard capability, (although
checkconfiged off by default), so each SGI system can easily become an online
book server to web clients on your internal or external network. To enable
DynaWeb, simply open a shell window by choosing Unix Shell from the Desktop toolchest and enter the following commands:
% su
# chkconfig dynaweb on
# /etc/init.d/dynaweb start
# exit
For further information on how to configure and use the DynaWeb server
please refer to the DynaWeb release notes and the DynaWeb Administration
and User Guides.
Once yourDynaWeb server is enabled and running you can access it via either of the following URLs:
Basically these are the same files that you get when you access the IRIS InSight manuals from a local file system. The text, graphics and linking structures are identical. Sharing the source files between the CD and WWW versions of these manuals allowed our publications department to put thousands of pages of material on the Web in a matter of a few weeks. Because SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879) and specifically the SGIDOC Document Type Defintion, uses a rich set of markup tags it's easy to map to a simple set of tags such as the HTML flavor of moment.
The IRIS InSight Professional Publisher 1.0 (SC4-INSGHTDEV 1.0) is a product available only to registered members of the SGI Developer's Program. IIPP 1.0 allows application developers to produce online help, IRIS InSight and now DynaWeb books all from one set of FrameMaker source files. Bundling DynaWeb ensures that the growing list of online delivery options, including web delivery, is available to all IRIS InSight Professional Publishers.
When properly performed, SGML markup captures all of the structural information needed to deliver documents in any medium -- paper, CD, or World Wide Web -- and to navigate those documents when the delivery medium is electronic. All of the navigational controls (tables of contents, arrows, etc.) that you see in the manuals on this Pubs Server are generated at run time from the structure of the document itself, just as they are in the CD versions.
The same is true of all the typographical rendering. The presentation of every element in the text is determined at the moment it is presented; with the exception of the width specifications for table columns (which are not used in the Web version), the source files contain no formatting information whatsoever. Instead, the presentation is governed entirely by stylesheets that apply the correct typographical treatment to each element based on its logical classification and place in the document structure.
Just as the type sizes and fonts are determined at the moment the text is displayed when these manuals are delivered from a CD or local file system, so the typography in these Web versions is determined by stylesheets that apply the appropriate HTML tags to the text as it is being downloaded to your Web browser. The only real difference between the manuals you see here and the ones that you can access from the product CD is that they use different stylesheets.
Since 100 percent of the HTML is automatically generated by stylesheets as it is downloaded to your web client from the DynaWeb server, it can easily be changed as the HTML tag set evolves. When HTML incorporates the ability to support stylesheet information, you will see the presentation of these manuals change quickly as DynaWeb publishers incorporate that new capability into their stylesheets.