Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: stylesheets availability

[Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk>]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 06:38:47AM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> / "Dave Crosby" <DaveCrosby@worldnet.att.net> was heard to say:
> | The biggest customizations I make are around chunking. It would be great to
> | be able to easily turn chunking on or off for <sectX> and <sectionX>. I also
> 
> To chunk at sect1 or sect2 or sect3, etc? And equivalently at section,
> section/section, section/section/section, etc.?
> 
> | tend to customize the look and feel things - the latest version of
> | stylesheets help some, but I find I still have to get into the guts of it.
> 
> What sorts of look and feel changes are inaccessible from
> customization layers?

I don't think that's the problem, per se.  A problem (that we have
with the FreeBSD customisations) is that DSSSL won't let you alter
variables once they've been defined.  This means that anywhere in your
stylesheets that a list of elements is created (for chunking, or for
displaying on the title page, or whatever) we have to cut and paste
stuff from your stylesheets in to ours.  Everytime there's a new release
of your stylesheets I go through them making sure that there's nothing
in our customisation layer is no longer appropriate, or isn't going to
work with your changes.

This *not* a criticism of your stylesheets.  From what I can tell, the
only alternative would be an approach where your work has tunable
parameters for just about everything, which would rapidly become
unwieldy, and it would be impossible for you to cater for everyone's
requirements.  As an example, look at

    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/doc/share/sgml/freebsd.dsl?rev=1.19&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

I certainly don't expect you to provide a 
%make-questions-bigger-and-bolder% knob -- this is just one of those
things where someone using your stylesheets has to bite the bullet and
write some code.

N
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