Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Couple of minor issues with the XHTML DTD or XSL?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 09:25:16AM -0600, ttg@charter.net wrote:
> Hi,
> It seems like the XHTML DTD or the XSL is generating a couple of
> misformed tags.  Specifically the <p/> and <dl/> tags.
> I am using xsmlproc with docbook-xsl-14.5 for my builds.
> According to the W3C recommendations, (Appendix C),

  The XHTML one:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines
    Appendix C. HTML Compatibility Guidelines

Please note:

   1/  "This appendix is informative."
   2/  the word "Compatibility"

> the minimized form of the <p></p> container should be
> <p /> with the leading space before the />.  

  And a few of other "tweaks" which are not part of the
requirement to serialize XML but mere attempts to get parsed
with legacy code which usually doesn't handle XML (nor even
HTML !) correctly in most cases. I honnestly tend to think
that if you want to process HTML use an HTML aware processor
if you want to process XML use an XML processor.
  In a nutshell if you expect HTML clients, generate HTML trying
to feed them XML in some convoluted ways ain't really a progress
and should be limited to the extreme case where one really can't
select HTML vs XML.

> The DTD also generates a partial dictionary
> list after the inserted TOC <dl/> and I can't
> find that minimized form in the recommendations,
> (that's not to say it isn't there <grin> but if it
> is a valid minimized form, it too would appear
> to need the leading space before the />.

  The extra changes needed to output XHTML are not present in the
XSLT specification. Either you output XML or you output HTML or you output
text. The specific rules you are asking for don't follow any of these
XSLT standard rules. So there is no way to generate them without
requiring to some extensions in one way or another, you can't require
that from XSLT directly.
  I *could* tweak the libxml2 XML serializer to try to recognize XHTML
specific XML documents and try to conform to those exotic rules. I'm
usure it makes really any good in the long term.

Daniel

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