Following up on the modular DocBook proposals so far, I'd like to seek
clarification on processing expectations of assembly elements.
My first impression is that an assembly element would be preprocessed to
resolve all resources, with the result being a valid DocBook XML document
with all the content pulled in, profiled, and relationships resolved. That
resolved document would then be fed into a second process using a DocBook
stylesheet for rendering. Like profiling, these two phases could be
pipelined, or they could be separated so the intermediate result can be
examined.
At least, this is likely how I would handle assemblies. This allows the
assembly process to generate assembly errors, and then halt if necessary
before passing the result to a formatting stylesheet, where likely many
fallout error messages would result due to incomplete input.
If this is the processing model, then what happens when an assembly element
contains more than one structure element after profiling? One could imagine
each structure being rendered as a separate output document. But if one
structure is intended for print and another for help, then they would likely
need different handling in assembly and different stylesheets downstream.
Also, Larry's example has a tutorial structure referenced as module of the
user.guide structure. It isn't clear whether the tutorial is meant to be a
separate output. For that matter, the element name <assembly> implies *one*
assembly, not multiple assemblies that are implied by multiple structures.
Certainly this issue should be left to the processing application, where if
you want just one output you pass in a parameter to specify the xml:id of
the structure you want generated. But is there a semantic explanation of
what an assembly with multiple structures means?
Or we could say an assembly contains one structure, and any nested
structures or alternative structures must exist elsewhere and be pulled in
by reference as modules into the single structure in an assembly.
Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
[email protected]
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