Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: shorthand versions of common tags

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Jack Cushman wrote:

> Many of the docbook tags that have HTML equivalents seem painfully verbose.
> (Examples: <emphasis role="bold">, <listitem>). I was wondering if it would
> be useful to create a wrapper stylesheet called something like shorthand.xsl
> that would create aliases for these tages. This file would simply define
> <li> as <listitem>, <i> or <b> as <emphasis>, and so on. It would take the
> stylesheet to call as a param, so it could work for html, chunk, fo and
> whatever else.
> 
> I'm not exactly sure how to implement this, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too
> difficult and I could probably work it out. My question is, is it desirable?
> I realize that it could get away from semantic markup, but I think its
> convenience would be worth it.

I think that this is not desirable. In my editor (Emacs+PSGML) there is
no difference between typing <li> and <listitem>. In almost every editor
you can define some short-cuts, bind macros to hot-keys and so on. IMHO
the latter is a good way to make typing DocBook easier.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
  Jirka Kosek  	                     
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
  http://www.kosek.cz