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Subject: DOCBOOK: Proposal: extend textobject to point to external files
The following trick is a common way to insert external sources directly into a DocBook document: <inlinemediaobject> <imageobject> <imagedata format="linespecific" fileref="filename"/> </imageobject> </inlinemediaobject> Several people have suggested that it would make more sense to allow a <textobject> to do this: <inlinemediaobject> <textobject> <textdata fileref="filename"/> </textobject> </inlinemediaobject> Until this morning, I had thought that the proper way to deal with this would be to use XInclude[1]. But I just realized that there are two significant disadvantages to XInclude: 1. It will require namespace support in DocBook. This is a minor inconvenience, but could potentially be troubling for SGMLers. 2. It will not allow the equivalent of entityref, which is possibly a requirement for some authors. I'm now leaning towards the following proposal. 1. Change the content model of textobject to: <!ELEMENT textobject (objectinfo?, (phrase|textdata|(%textobject.mix;)+))> 2. Add a textdata element: <!ELEMENT textdata EMPTY> <!ATTLIST textdata %common.attrib; %objectdata.attrib; %local.textdata.attrib; %textdata.role.attrib; > Where objectdata.attrib contains (fileref, entityref, format, etc.) 3. Allow textobject as the only child of {inline}mediaobject. (Currently the media objects require at least one image, audio, or video. That's the minimum required, I think. It would also be possible to allow <textobject> or <textdata> in more content models (to avoid the somewhat odd <inlinemediaobject> wrapper inside, for example, <programlisting>. Perhaps textobject should be allowed anywhere inlinemediaobject is allowed... Be seeing you, norm [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude -- Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | To create a little flower is the http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | labour of ages.--Blake Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |
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