Re: DOCBOOK: re step container for procedure

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net> was heard to say:
[...]
| RFE 144 is adding intro material to lists.  I see now (though I
| didn't before) that this is not a good idea.
| 
| But at this point I'll leave things to the Docbook TC.

Technically, we've already accepted RFE 144 so the current models
of orderedlist, variablelist, calloutlist, procedure, and itemizedlist
all allow:

  optional title
  optional bag of stuff
  one or more items

Perhaps this was not the best choice, but it was the model that
Procedure allowed and there's never (before) been a complaint about
that aspect of procedures.

If we had instead changed procedure for consistency, then all these
lists would have been:

  optional title
  one or more items

I don't think this would satisfy Micheal Smith's use case, since it
would not easily allow reusing the steps by reference to their
container without simultaneously reusing the title.

I'm opposed to adding a 'stepset' wrapper around the steps (and
by extension a 'listitems' wrapper around the list items):

1. If required, it would introduce a new level of wrapper in every
   procedure, even when there was no need for most authors in most cases.

2. If optional, it would allow procedures to contain either a set
   of steps or a stepset and having two ways to do the same thing
   is bad.

3. If stepset is allowed to have a title, then you'd have titles
   at two different levels in the procedure and that strikes me as
   awkward.

I'd be interested to hear what others think about the content model of
these list-like things.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | We humans are such limited
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | creatures--how is it that there
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | are so few limits when it comes to
                                   | human suffering?--Pierre Marivaux