Re: [docbook] Best Practise of Referencing Between Modules in Assemblies?

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

I meant to also add that the issue of what to do with links that don't resolve once a 
document is assembled is a general one.  The stylesheets could be customized to simply 
ignore unresolved links, on the assumption that the link failure is due to excluded 
content rather than a typo in the link.  I don't know if there is a way for a 
stylesheet to distinguish between the two cases.  It would be good for the processor 
to at least emit an error message during processing so that such unresolved links 
could be confirmed.

The other half of the problem making sure the written context of such a disappearing 
link still makes sense.  Putting links in the middle of a sentence risks creating a 
garbled sentence if the link text disappears.  I've written customizations where the 
practice was to place such "soft" links as the sole content in a standalone para, and 
if the link does not resolve, the entire para disappears.  The link style in that case 
included generating the surrounding text ("See ... for more information").  You could 
also create an itemizedlist with role="relatedlinks" to contain them.  Then the 
stylesheet could also omit the listitem container of an unresolved link, and the 
entire list and list title if none of the links resolve in the list.

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>
To: "Jirka Kosek" <jirka@kosek.cz>; "Thomas Schraitle" <tom_schr@web.de>
Cc: <docbook@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 9:33 AM
Subject: Re: [docbook] Best Practise of Referencing Between Modules in Assemblies?


> The stylesheets do not currently support such XLink syntax.  The current assembly 
> stylesheet would first need to preserve the xml filenames in xml:base attributes 
> when assembling resources into a single DocBook document for processing.  That 
> should be done anyway to preserve relative paths to images and such.
>
> You can use olinks right now.  One of the most frequent uses of olinks is for 
> linking between modular content. Olinks let you avoid hard coding filenames in your 
> links, which can be troublesome to maintain if you rename or move files.
>
> Bob Stayton
> Sagehill Enterprises
> bobs@sagehill.net
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jirka Kosek" <jirka@kosek.cz>
> To: "Thomas Schraitle" <tom_schr@web.de>
> Cc: <docbook@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 3:38 AM
> Subject: Re: [docbook] Best Practise of Referencing Between Modules in Assemblies?
>
> On 17.5.2012 19:32, Thomas Schraitle wrote:
>
> > as I'm currently playing with DocBook assemblies, I'm wondering about the
> > "best practise" of referencing from one module into another.
> ...
> > What do you think? Do you have used assemblies already and how do you deal
> > with referencing? Do I miss anything?
>
> First, it's good that someone is using assemblies -- it would be very
> hard to develop them without feedback from users. Regarding links, I
> think that proper way of linking is to use XLink pointing to source XML
> file of module and optionally to ID withing this fragment. E.g.:
>
> <xref xlink:href="installation.xml#system.requirements"/>
>
> However I'm not sure that stylesheets are already supporting this mechanism.
>
>
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