Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Q & A TOC missing literal elements

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

> From: Vladimir G Ivanovic <vladimir@acm.org>
> 
> The <literal> elements in my <question> elements are not passed through
> to the Q & A's table of contents. Is there something I'm not doing that
> should be?

It is not something you are doing wrong. The TOC entries for
Q&A will only produce plain text, based on the way the XSL stylesheet
is currently written.  If you want the details,
here is the relevant template in html/qandaset.xsl:

<xsl:template match="question" mode="qandatoc.mode">
  <xsl:variable name="firstch" select="(*[name(.)!='label'])[1]"/>
 
  <dt>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="label.markup"/>
    <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
    <a>
      <xsl:attribute name="href">
        <xsl:call-template name="href.target"/>
      </xsl:attribute>
      <xsl:value-of select="$firstch"/>
    </a>
  [stuff deleted]
                  
This lines sets the variable 'firstch':

  <xsl:variable name="firstch" select="(*[name(.)!='label'])[1]"/>

The XPath expression selects the first child node of
<question> that is not a <label> element.  In your example,
this is the <para> element inside your <question>.

Further down when it is forming the <a> link, the text it
uses is produced using:

   <xsl:value-of select="$firstch"/>

When you use <xsl:value-of> on a node, it just outputs the
text of the node and its children, so all element markup is
lost.

Since I didn't write the stylesheet, I can only speculate
that this was done to simplify processing.  A <question>
element can contain any number of DocBook elements, and the
TOC processing would have to handle those elements
in the TOC context.  If instead of using <xsl:value-of>
you were to use <xsl:apply-templates>, you'd be putting a <para>
as well as a <literal> in your TOC, or else the stylesheet would
have to disable <para> and many other elements when in TOC
mode to prevent that.

A <qandaentry> doesn't permit a <title> to put in
the TOC, so this method simplies dealing with 
the range of possible elements that might
appear in a question.

bobs
Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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