Hi,
when working with DocBook, I had the problem that I wanted to format my
tables with my custom CSS. The first thing I tried was to pick the
generated class attribute from the fragment that was generated for an
informaltable but I realized there was no such, so I couldn't add my
styling based on the class attribute. Next idea was to apply the styling
generally to tables but it quickly proved to be incorrect since it also
changed another things that were achieved with tables, e.g. qandaset and
I definitely didn't want those to be formatted like my real tables.
Based on this problem I looked into the output and I experienced that
the stylesheets frequently emit layout-specific attributes but no
classes. I was very surprised by this since it is often emphasized that
DocBook is used to mark up structure and semantic information but not
layout. Similarly, (X)HTML is meant to be used for structure and not
layout and layout should be specified by CSS. Because of the DocBook
Project's strong commitment of best practices and correct usage of XML
technologies, I expected that this paradigm was also more or less
achieved in the stylesheets. Imho, DocBook XSL should produce HTML
Strict and provide a good default CSS and only use XSLT parameters to
control structure-related transformation behavior and not formatting. I
would like to know if there is an effort towards more structure-oriented
HTML (maybe even HTML Strict) or is there any reason for the current
design that I may be missing? Please note that it is not just a question
of correct or incorrect design but it is not possible at all to apply a
CSS to specific parts of the output, which is definitely a defect. (Yes,
I know about the table.* XSLT parameters but this is not what I need and
it is very limited and not convenient at all to hardcode things here.)
Gabor
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