Re: [docbook] Status attribute

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

Hi Togan,

Am Sonntag, 14. April 2013, 16:39:24 schrieb Togan Muftuoglu:
> [...]
> The document I am trying to fix is a badly formatted usermanual, which
> in the beginning was not even validating. It was full with sectX
> elements which included informaltables to create definitions for various
> terminology used by the software. These sectX had status either set as
> draft or final.

Ok, I see. However, I still don't know what you want to do with this 
information. :)


> I have now converted such sectX to variablelists and get rid of the
> informaltable definitions. However I can't make any attributions to
> these variablelists if they are meant to be draft or final as with the
> profiling of status I am able to produce a final output.

By the way, just as an additional information: If you need/want to transform 
your original document again, you can do it with XSLT. I've written a topic 
about transforming a sectX element into a section. This is not entirely your 
use case, but with some (small?) modification you can avoid manual editing:

  http://doccookbook.sf.net/html/en/dbc.structure.sectX-to-section.html

 
> [...]
> > The closest attribute to status may be a revision or condition attribute,
> > which are allowed on very element.
> 
> Hmm, never have thought about it in this sense, however it should work
> just need to convert all other status attributes to one of these to
> achieve consistency

Marking up an element with @status, @revision, @condition (or whatever you 
use) is one side of the coin. The other side is what you want to do with this 
information. 

Usually I value consistency, but in this case I wouldn't recommend to replace 
all status attributes. The @status attribute influences how a document is 
shown. For example, setting status to "draft" and the parameter $draft.mode to 
"yes" will use a background image (which is taken from 
$draft.watermark.image). 

This is already implemented in the DocBook stylesheets. You get this behaviour 
for free, if you marked up your division elements with status. This may or may 
not what you want. The question is, how you want to show other elements 
containing your former status attribute (which is now a condition or 
revision).


-- 
Gruß/Regards
  Thomas Schraitle