
                          rapple, release 1.0

rapple is a lightweight XML based tool written in C by Alan Moran that 
permits web authors to produce standards based web content of a consistent 
and high quality.  rapple builds on existing libraries, most notably tidylib 
(http://tidy.sourceforge.net/) and expat (http://expat.sourceforge.net/), to 
process HTML files by transforming them into XHTML before applying an XSLT 
to generate the final output.  rapple provides additional parsing of its own 
that supports this process.  rapple requires an XSLT processor and currently 
supports both sablotron (http://www.gingerall.com/) and libxslt 
(http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/). rapple is distributed under the BSD license and
is subject to the conditions as described in the COPYING file.

installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file but are summarised
here for convenience.  prior to building rapple you must run the configure
script with your preferred options.  the most important of these is the choice 
of installation directory which you can set using the --prefix option e.g.,

         ./configure --prefix=/path/to/install/dir

by default rapple will compile with support for the sablotron XSLT processor.
if you have a preference for libxml/libxslt then you can express this with
the --with-xslt-proc option, i.e.,

         ./configure --with-xslt-proc=libxslt

if you require MySQL support then you must request it using the following
option,

         ./configure --enable-mysql

note that you must ensure that MySQL client libraries are installed on
your system (see MySQL documentation for further details.)

in some cases the configure script might not be able to find the required
libraries (usually if they are installed in non-standard locations).  you
can indicate where they are to be found by supplying CFLAGS and LDFLAGS, i.e.,

         ./configure CFLAGS=-I/my/includes LDFLAGS="-L/my/libs -R/my/libs"

(by setting the -R/my/libs option in LDFLAGS you will not need to set the
run-time load path environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH !)

once configure is complete you can build rapple by issuing the following,

         ./make
         ./make install

further information (incl. latest news and developments) can be found at the
rapple homepage (http://rapple.sourceforge.net).  feedback (incl. bug reports
and feature requests) should be directed to a_j_moran@users.sourceforge.net.

enjoy!
Alan Moran.


