This page describes the XML format used for the Apache HTTP Server documentation and how to transform it into HTML for review.
The documentation is written in a custom XML format with its own DTD. The DTD is in the style directory of the manual.
For markup conventions, element usage, prose style rules, and typographic guidelines, see the Documentation Style Guide.
Modern browsers can render the XML files directly by applying the
referenced XSLT stylesheet. Simply open the .xml file in your browser
to see a reasonable approximation of the final output. This lets you
check your work without any build setup.
For the authoritative rendering, use the Ant build system described below.
The official build uses Xalan + Xerces (Java) via Apache Ant. This ensures consistent HTML output across all contributors.
From your checkout:
cd docs/manual
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/docs-build/trunk build
cd build
./build.sh all
The all target builds documentation for all available languages. To
build only English:
./build.sh
To build a specific language (e.g., French):
./build.sh fr
To see all available targets:
./build.sh -projecthelp
The validate-xhtml target uses the W3C Nu HTML Checker. If you don't
already have it, download vnu.jar into the build/ directory:
curl -L -o vnu.jar https://github.com/validator/validator/releases/download/latest/vnu.jar
See https://github.com/validator/validator for details.
Before submitting a patch, validate your XML and the generated HTML:
./build.sh validate-xml
./build.sh validate-xhtml
These checks will catch malformed XML, broken cross-references, and invalid HTML output. Please run them before sending patches — it saves everyone time.
When adding a new module, the build process generates entries in
mod/allmodules.xml and creates accompanying metafiles. This step
requires a working Perl installation. If you don't have Perl available,
just note this in your patch submission and someone on the team will
handle it.