OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

docbook message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: Re: DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 24 Sep 2003


[ Repost, unsigned. ]

/ Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> was heard to say:
| 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.

I guess we should consider this again. At the very least, I think the
minutes need to clearly show that we understood the problem.

Bob, can you put this on the agenda for us again. Thanks.

| 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

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Everything should be made as
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | simple as possible, but no simpler.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |


[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]