If you are creating a website, you probably have some existing content that you want to incorporate into it. You don't need to convert everything to webpage elements. Rather, you can add entries to your website structure that simply point to other documents available at your web address.

As described in the previous section, the tocentry element in your layout.xml file can take an href attribute instead of page and file attributes. The href value can point to other documents on your site, using an absolute or relative URL. You just need to add an id attribute and a title element. Following are two examples, one pointing to another website, and the other using a relative reference.

<tocentry  id="nwalsh.com"  href="http://nwalsh com">
  <title>Norm Walsh's Website</title>
</tocentry>

<tocentry  id="mybook"  href="../mybook/index.html">
  <title>My Book</title>
</tocentry>

Any relative URL is taken as relative to the output-root directory for your website (starting with Website version 2.4).

If you want to cross reference from your webpages to the additional content, you can set up your site to use external olinks with the target.database.document parameter. See the section “Linking to other sites” for more information.