Re: [docbook-apps] DocBook XSL stylesheets violate structure-oriented paradigm

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

Hi Gabor,
The stylesheet authors try to accomodate many types of users, some of which need 
strict HTML and CSS, and some that want the HTML to look usable without adding their 
own CSS stylesheet.  There is a stylesheet param named 'make.clean.html', which when 
set to 1 will remove most of the internal styling.  The stylesheet also has a couple 
of parameters that can generate a CSS file from an XML source file for chunked output 
such as 'custom.css'source'.

I'm surprised about the comment about class attributes.  The stylesheets emit class 
values for pretty much every element.  An informaltable is contained in a div element 
with class="informaltable".  Was that not present in your output?

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gabor Kovesdan" <gabor@kovesdan.org>
To: "DocBook Apps Mailing List" <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 5:51 AM
Subject: [docbook-apps] DocBook XSL stylesheets violate structure-oriented paradigm


> 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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