Re: [docbook] Re: Tables, braille and other stuff

[Yann Dirson <ydirson@fr.alcove.com>]

On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 02:58:21PM -0500, David Cramer wrote:
> I'd suggest writing a custom dtd to hold the information (probably a
> variant of docbook that allows docbook block level things below a
> certain level): 
> 
> <mydtd:widget product-version="1.1">
> 	<para>This thingy does such and such.</para>
> </mydtd:widget>
> 
> Then write an xsl that converts mydtd xml to docbook to be included in
> your documents--sometimes as a table, sometimes a list, sometimes all of
> it, sometimes a subset, depending on your needs.

Incremental rendering by applying successive stylesheets is certainly
a good option, but I don't take this as a good reason to take such
things out of DocBook and let the latter only hold the presentational
aspect of things.

This raises in my mind another concern: we currently have in DocBook
several constructs which are mostly not used by a by-hand composer
(ToC, Index, etc), and I guess we could see the "table" stuff in the
same way.

(at this point /me prepares to be flamed :)

Since DocBook is such a large DTD, it may make sense to have a "main
set of elements", which would constitute the DocBook DTD proper, and
an extended one, built as a customisation layer above DocBook (say
"Presentationnal DocBook"), which would add those extra elements with
a strong presentationnal bias.

Regards,
-- 
Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Technical support manager                Responsable de l'assistance technique
Senior Free-Software Consultant          Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres
Debian developer (dirson@debian.org)                        Développeur Debian