Re: DOCBOOK: Presentational markup in Docbook

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> was heard to say:
| In strict XHTML 1.1 I can use style attributes containing CSS rules
| to note that a particular element should be bold, italic, red, or
| some such.

If you're talking about completely standoff styling, that's a
stylesheet issue and applies equally well to both XHTML and DocBook.
What I mean is that

  body div p em { color: red }

and

  book chapter p emphasis { color: red }

are equivalent.

| If necessary, I can add a span element to give me
| something to hang the CSS off of.

Sticking in span elements blurs the distinction between semantics and
presentation, but that's entirely necessary sometimes. The equivalent
of span in DocBook is 'phrase'.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, so I've just written (but
not yet checked in) some patches to the DocBook XSL stylesheets to
allow 'role' attributes on 'emphasis' and 'phrase' to be passed
through automatically as class attributes on the corresponding span.

| Is there any equivalent in Docbook? That is, is there any way to say
| that I want these three words to be red? or that element to be bold?
| Or that this note should be in a sans serif font? Mostly I'm happy
| with Docbook's semantic markup, but occasionally it seems that
| something is missing.

No. The best you can do is say, this set of words (<phrase>) has some
special meaning (role) and code your stylesheets accordingly.

| XHTML lets me apply unique styles without messing up the semantic
| nature of my document. Does Docbook?  --

Whether or not <span class="red">stuff</span> is messing up the
semantics of your document or not is open to discussion :-)

But in the next XSL release, you should be able to say
<phrase role="red">stuff</phrase> and get that translated into the
preceding span accordingly.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | It is a folly to expect men to do
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | all that they may reasonably be
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | expected to do.--Archbishop Whately