Adding a javascript tracker to your Docbook document

Sat 22 January 2011

If you convert a docbook document in a chunked HTML form, it would presumably be very useful for you to place one of the various available javascript based trackers on each of your pages to see what is most popular, linked to etc.

I'm assuming you've already got to the point where you have your DSSSL stylesheet going (see something like my prior entry).

It doesn't appear you can get arbitrary output into the <head> tag -- the %html-header-tags% variable is really just designed for META tags and there doesn't appear to be anything else in the standard stylesheets to override.

So the trick is to use $html-body-start$ . But you have to be a little bit tricky to actually get your javascript to slip past the SGML parser. After several attempts and a bit of googling I finally ended up with the following for a Google Analytics tracker, using string-append to get the javascript comment filtering in:

(define ($html-body-start$)
  (make element gi: "script"
  attributes: '(("language" "javascript")
                ("type" "text/javascript"))
            (make formatting-instruction
              data: (string-append "<" "!--
 var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXXXX-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
// --" ">"))))