Re: [docbook-apps] Semicolon in attribute value?

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

Hi Eric,
The revisionflag attribute is defined in the DocBook DTD using a list of 
enumerated values, and enumerated values must conform to the NMTOKEN 
character set, which excludes spaces and semicolons among others.  If you 
want to use semicolons, you will have to convert the attribute to CDATA 
type:

<!ENTITY % revisionflag.attrib
	"revisionflag	CDATA	#IMPLIED">

Then you can put whatever you want.  However, you also lose all value 
checking by the DTD, so typos will validate as well.

But if you don't mind further probing, it looks like you are using 
revisionflag for both change markup and conditional text (profiling in 
DocBook parlance).  I would suggest separating those functions into two 
attributes, leaving revisionflag unchanged, and using another profiling 
attribute for pdf, html, etc.  The profiling attributes support semicolons 
because they are defined as CDATA, and more importantly, the XSL stylesheet 
supports the semicolons for profiling with multiple selections, as described 
in this chapter:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Profiling.html


Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Nordlund, Eric" <ericn@amazon.com>
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 10:49 AM
To: <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: [docbook-apps] Semicolon in attribute value?

> Hello.
>
> Does anyone know how to get a semicolon to validate in an attribute value? 
> I have a ton of content that has elements tagged with the following 
> revisionflag attributes:
>
> revisionflag="html;htmlcond"
> revisionflag="pdf;pdfcond"
>
>
> I think our transforms look for these values to see which image to use in 
> an output, and the transforms work fine. The problem is that I get a ton 
> of validation errors in my editor for all of these entries and they create 
> a lot of noise that could drown out a real error. Is there a way for me to 
> make these semicolons work? For example, can I escape them in the DTD so 
> that the validator thinks that they are allowable values?
>
> Or, is there a way for me to tell the validator to ignore these errors (I 
> think this might be more difficult).
>
> Here is a snippet from my dbpoolx.mod file:
>
> <!ENTITY % revisionflag.attrib
>             "revisionflag    (changed
>                                     |added
>                                     |deleted
>                                     |off
>                                     |pdf
>                                     |pdfcond
>                                     |html
>                                     |htmlcond
>                                     |kindle
>                                     |kindlecond
>                                     |kindle-epub-cond) 
> #IMPLIED">
>
> I tried adding the semicolon values, but that breaks the DTD. I tried 
> using single and double quotes around them and that also broke the DTD. I 
> cannot change the way that the attribute values are displayed in the book 
> XML (although that would obviously be the easiest way to do this) because 
> I am in a multi-author environment. I need this to be a change I can make 
> to the DTD so that it will work with all of our existing content and just 
> get rid of my validation errors.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Eric N.
>
>
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