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Subject: Re: [docbook] DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 24 Sep2003
Dear TC The decision is yours to make, but before you finalize it I want to make sure that you understand my request. The addition of attribute "language" neither satisfies my request [RFE 798616] nor does it solve the problem I have in the scenario I described. The tool I use for transforming DBX to XHTML does syntax markup for syntax highlighting. It must know the syntax of a listing in order to find out if it can mark it up. Since some languages have more than one (alternative) syntax/notation, authors of DocBook documents must have a way to explicitly specify the syntax of listings (for elements "code", "programlisting", and ideally most or all literal layout elements such as "literallayout" and "screen" and "filelisting" if this will exist). This <programlisting language="RNG">... does not specify the syntax of the code listing. Thus I need to be able to write something like <programlisting language="RNG" syntax="XML">... especially since it could also be <programlisting language="RNG" syntax="text">... A tool handling XML syntax can then act on all listings with syntax="XML". If it must act on language="[any XML langauage]" then it would need to have a list of all XML languages which will never be sufficient since people invent their own grammars. The transformastion tool can't be sure if it should treat the following as XML: <programlisting language="RNG">... and a guess can be incorrect. It could to some sniffing which is never a good solution. The best solution I see is to specify the syntax, for example via syntax="XML" or notation="XML". > The 'language' attribute is what we have for the synopsis elements. > It's what HTML uses. The latest version of XHTML uses attribute "xml:lang" and does not include attribute "lang". see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/changes.html#a_changes The value of attribute "xml:lang" is one listed in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt which explicitly excludes computer languages. > It seems like you can overload language with > alternates if you really need to. One workaround I see is to do <programlisting language="RNG/XML">... <programlisting language="RNG/text">... which is neither clear nor specific enough, and is harder to work with (validation, combinations, etc). > Perhaps 'syntax' is better, but we already have 'language'. "syntax" is not a different name for "language". Feel free to keep "language", but please add "syntax" or "notation". > If we didn't have language, we might perfer syntax, They are two different things which provide information about different aspects of the element content. Both attributes are useful, I especially need the latter one. > but do we want to move to syntax? I simply need "syntax" or "notation", there's no need to remove "language". For example: <programlisting language="RNG" syntax="XML">... <programlisting language="RNG" syntax="text">... or <programlisting language="RNG" notation="XML">... <programlisting language="RNG" notation="text">... Please also see RFE 798616 https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=798616&group_id=21935&atid=384107 Tobi [RFE 798616] syntax="" or notation="" needed for code listings https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=798616&group_id=21935&atid=384107 also see http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=692319&group_id=21935&atid=373750
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