RE: [docbook-apps] To Rene Hache, Larry Garfield, Bob Stayton, Jirka Kosek - About a former XHTML accessiblity project

["Wright, Barton" <Barton.Wright@iona.com>]

Nicolas,

 

You state the case very well. I have also longed for a simple, modern, elegant XHTML output from DocBook source. This goal was elusive when designing Iona's DocBook-sourced XHTML books, and we fell far short of the clean output over in the Linux from Scratch project.

 

It is sometimes disappointing to have set up a modern document building process, where books can be generated with the flick of the wrist -- only to see the output littered with dozens of empty div's and table-based layout. DocBook-generated HTML is easy to spot in view-source mode because of these features, and DocBook-generated XHTML rarely passes standard validation tests. Sometimes it looks like a great leap forward into the 1990's.

 

But even so, DocBook is the only game in town. And you don't have to buy an entire ecosystem like with most adventures in the DITA world. Perhaps over time, we can slowly steer the great DocBook tanker into the safe harbor of validated XHTML output.

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<snip> 

My goal is not only accessibility (I think these results are tolerably well accessible). What should be a common goal is to get a semantically correct, and elegant, output.

For example, tables should be used only to present tabular data and not for the layout (but it seems everybody agrees with that).

Definition lists should be used to present... lists of definitions.

Here is an equivalence:

DocBook

<glossdiv>
    <glossentry>
        <glossterm>
            Definition term 1
        </glossterm>
        <glossdef>
            Definition data 1
        </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
    <glossentry>
        <glossterm>
            Definition term 2
        </glossterm>
        <glossdef>
            Definition data 2
        </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
</glossdiv>


could be transformed to:


XHTML

<dl class="glossary">
    <dt id="term01">
        Definition term 1
    </dt>
    <dd>
        Definition data 1
    </dd>
    <dt id="term02">
        Definition term 2
    </dt>
    <dd>
        Definition data 2
    </dd>
</dl>




DocBook

<qandaset>
    <qandaentry>
        <question>
            FAQ question 1
        </question>
        <answer>
            FAQ answer 1
        </answer>
    </qandaentry>
    <qandaentry>
        <question>
            FAQ question 2
        </question>
        <answer>
            FAQ answer 2
        </answer>
    </qandaentry>
</qandaset>


could be transformed to:


XHTML

<ol class="qandaset">
    <li id="qandaentry01">
        <p class="question">
            FAQ question 1
        </p>
        <p class="answer">
            FAQ answer 1
        </p>
    </li>
    <li id="qandaentry02">
        <p class="question">
            FAQ question 2
        </p>
        <p class="answer">
            FAQ answer 2
        </p>
    </li>
</ol>

As you can see, there is no more need for tables, as well as hard-coded sections numbers, since they are automatically generated by the browser (and it is possible to use a <ul> instead if we don't want automatic numbering).

Of course, DocBook is much more detailed, but it is considerably easier to strip some details than the reverse. Both DocBook and XHTML are XML flavors and they share many semantical structures, so it should be fairly easy to better preserve these structures. What are markups in DocBook can be transformed as attributes in XHTML to preserve the semantical meaning and give the required hooks for CSS presentation. In fact, it is much easier than transforming to "old-fashioned" HTML with tables layout.

I'll have a look at the LFS XHTML XSLT (proposed by M. Canales), and see if they comply with such a state of mind.
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