Hi,
IMO there's already the profiling mechanism to have conditional elements:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Profiling.html
I think it's enough for elements used for a specific format. It's what I
use to tweak PDF and HTML outputs.
Regards,
BG
On Sun, 03 Jun 2012 10:53:01 +0200, Thomas Schraitle <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi,
the Common Effectivity Attributes[1] in TDG5.1 contains a lot of useful
attributes. However, IMHO, we don't have a way to express that an element
"belongs" to a specific (output) format only.
As such, I would propose to add such a "format" attribute to the DocBook
schema (in the following text I use "format" for simplicity reasons. If
you
don't like it, feel free to suggest a different name like "outputformat",
"targetformat", or whatever you think is appropriate.)
I know the committee is hesitent to add additional attributes to the
schema,
but I think it has several benefits. Here is why I think this is useful:
1. Currently, the DocBook stylesheets support several output formats.
Probably
this list will grow in the future.
Dealing with such a variety of possible output formats makes it sometimes
harder to write in a "format independant" way. However, if someone really
wants to express that a certain element is only useful for PDF, the
current
list of common attributes doesn't support this.
From a semantic point of view, no common effectivity attributes are
suited for
this task. By using a "format" attribute in combination with profiling,
I can
distinguish such a case.
2. The current assembly schema contains in its <output/>[2] element a
"format"
attribute (actually that's where this idea originated).
However, with the raise of assemblies and modules, output formats will
become
much more important. From a usability point of view, having a consistent
"format" attribute in DocBook and in <output/> does make sense: users can
recognize that as the same "thing".
3. Adding "only" an attribute to the DocBook schema is not as intrusive
than
adding a new element. :) The changes to the schema are minimal:
db.format.attribute =
## Identifies the target format to which the element applies
attribute format { text }
db.effectivity.attributes =
...
& db.format.attribute?
Of course, the profiling stylesheet needs to be changed as well. However,
apart from these two parts, no other changes are needed.
Unfortunately, after some further investigations, there is a problem:
"format"
is already occupied in db.common.data.attributes which is used by
videodata,
audiodata, imagedata, and textdata. So *if* you think this idea is
useful, we
have to give it a different name anyway.
What do you think? Does anybody use documents which contain target
specific
information in combination with profiling?
---- References
[1] http://www.docbook.org/tdg51/en/html/ref-
elements.html#common.effectivity.attributes
[2] http://www.docbook.org/tdg51/en/html/output.html
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