Marking up generated content

["Christian Roth" <roth@infinity-loop.de>]

Hi,

I'm looking for a good way to markup generated content, i.e. sections
that get updated resp. replaced just before publication by an additional
processing step. Things likely to get automatically replaced are the
current date, a processor identification or the geographical location of
the publishing machine.

In some pseudo XML, this would look like:

<para>
  Signed <gentext type="Location.City">Munich</gentext>, 
  <gentext type="Date.Long">November 25, 2003</gentext>: Christian
</para>
<para>
  (Processed by <gentext type="Processor.Name">XalanJ 2.5.2</gentext> 
  at <gentext type="Time.Short">23:10</gentext>)
</para>

In lieu of the <gentext> elements in the above, should I simply use
<phrase> with a custom role attribute? <replaceable> seems to have
different semantics and therefore seems not to be a good choice here.

I'm also looking at making it obvious to the author of the "template"
DocBook document that manual changes to the contents of the <gentext>
elements will be discarded at publishing time, so he better not wasted
any time on doing it.

Are there any general rules or best practices for accomplishing this?


Best regards
Christian Roth

-- 
infinity-loop GmbH
Christian Roth
CTO
http://www.infinity-loop.de
roth@infinity-loop.de