generating a custom css to epub3 -- how? (+ italics?)

[Robert Nagle <idiotprogrammer@gmail.com>]

 I've started to play around with the epub3 stylesheets. I noticed
that with the epub3 there is a docbook.epub.css which is generated in
the output directory.

I don't know what the rationale for this was (although I appreciate
that there are default css values included, and that you can add a
secondary css file which is also found in the package.opf file).

1. In a thread last year
http://markmail.org/search/?q=docbook.css.source&q=list%3Aorg.oasis-open.lists.docbook-apps#query:docbook.css.source%20list%3Aorg.oasis-open.lists.docbook-apps+page:1+mid:2blrnk6etoz5jr63+state:results
Bob mentions this:

******************************************
Regarding your objections, I get around those by using XInclude. I have a
standard CSS file that I include into an XML file using XInclude:

<style> <xi:include href="mycustom.css" parse="text"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/> </style>

That way I keep all the edits in one standard CSS file, and I don't have to copy
it into each output directory using a separate command.
*************************************************


I tried doing what Bob suggested, but it doesn't work -- possibly
because I don't really understand what is going on here.

**********
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
    xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xmlns:d="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook";
    xmlns:date="http://exslt.org/dates-and-times";
xmlns:saxon="http://icl.com/saxon";
    exclude-result-prefixes="d date saxon" version="1.0">

    <xsl:import
href="../../../../1latest/docbook-xsl-snapshot/epub3/chunk.xsl"/>

<xsl:param name="docbook.css.source">docbook2.css.xml</xsl:param>
    <style>
      <xi:include href="docbook2.css" parse="text"
    xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>
    </style>
</xsl:stylesheet>
***************************

Am I supposed to create a docbook2.css.xml file inside the source
directory  or a docbook2.css file? Or both?

One final thing.  I noticed a curious omission in the default css
styles. I would expect to see these things in the default docbook.epub
css file in every case.

.italic
{
font-style: italic;
}

.bold
{

  font-weight: bold;
}



-- 
Robert Nagle
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http://www.robertnagle.info