Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: valid xhtml and chunking

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Colin Paul Adams <colin@colina.demon.co.uk> was heard to say:
| Firstly, I needed to be able to specify the xml output method, and the
| public and system doctype keywords. The html/chunker.xsl file did not
| seem very conducive to this (I resorted to editing the file), as I
| could not find an appropriate parameter to specify in the stylesheet
| driver (have I missed something?).

You can't specify parameters on xsl:output (they aren't AVTs) so you
have to do it yourself:

  <xsl:stylesheet ...>
    <xsl:import href=".../chunk.xsl"/>
    <xsl:output .../>
  </xsl:stylesheet>

| Against the Transitional DTD, the only problem I found was that the
| validator complains about missing the alt attribute from img tags. I

Then you haven't provided it in your source documents.

| have come up against this problem myself when writing stylesheets, and
| got round it by coding alt=" " on every img tag.

Yuck!

| Lastly, using saxon, the xml declaration gets written to stdout for
| the document as a whole, and so does not end up in index.xhtml. The
| chunks all get a xml declaration.

Hmm. I know a declaration gets written to stdout, but I didn't think
it was the index.xhtml declaration (that's a chunk like any other).

| I notice that the presence of an xml declaration screws up
| presentation of the pages in opera 5 (and probably in other browsers
| that also claim to support xhtml - huh!). So a parameter to specify
| whether or not to omit the xml declaration would also be useful.

Again, can't be done. But you can do it in your customization layer.

| Norman, if after pointing out anything I have missed, then if you
| like, I will provide the neccesary code to allow generation of fully
| validating xhtml code.

If only it was that easy. This is the really troubling problem:

<para>
  <table>...</table>
</para>

This is legal DocBook but not legal HTML and I don't know of any easy
way to deal with it (for table, substitute any (and every) element
that generates a "block" HTML tag).

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | On the other hand, you have
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | different fingers.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |