DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook Structuring Problems

[John Storrs <lme@storrs.demon.co.uk>]

I'm experimenting with Docbook, currently using jade and Norm's stylesheets. My
interest is enterprise documentation systems, with html and print generation
from sgml/xml sources. 

In the sort of application I'm considering source trees may be deep, with
hundreds or thousands of files. The source subtree for a typical higher level
component (Book, Article, Chapter etc)  will be some way down the main tree, and
the right place for a list defining its components will be at the head of this
subtree. In general there will be multiple uses of some source subtrees in a
single document, and multiple documents using some subtrees.  Html chunk output
should be tree structured, with meaningful and stable file names related to
content.

I can't currently see how to manage this inside the sgml system:
As I understand it from 'The Definitive Guide', external general entities
may be defined only in the DTD or in the single document type declaration. How
can distributed entity definitions be realised? Perhaps only with a script?
Can html tree output be achieved with the tools I'm using or other open source
tools? Norm uses the ID attribute to provide a string for a user-defined html
filename, but as neither '/' nor / are permitted in IDs this only generates
a flat file space. Also, defining an ID results in an error if source files are
re-used.  Can anyone advise?

John Storrs

--
John Storrs, Laboratory for Micro Enterprise
125 Culham 1 Site, Culham, Abingdon OX14 3DA, UK
tel/fax 01865 407085  email lme@storrs.demon.co.uk
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