using xpointer with modular DocBook

[Stefan Seefeld <stefan@seefeld.name>]

Hello,

I'm trying to refactor a DocBook document a little, moving certain
sections into an external document and xi:including them subsequently
using xpointers.

The document I want to refactor is a software API specification, where
each definition contains a small section I'd like to move out into a
separate ("meta-model") document. The resulting API document will thus
contain hundrets of references to always the same external document,
pulling in different nodes for the different definitions.

The xinclude syntax I use right now looks like this:

      <variablelist>
    <xi:include href="../vsip/signal.xml"
           
xpointer="xmlns(db=http://docbook.org/ns/docbook)xpointer(//db:varlistentry[@xml:id='foo'])"/>
      ...
      </variablelist>

This works well, but introduces a lot of redundancy as for each chunk
I'd like to include I have to redefine the namespace used in the xpath
expression. Is there a way to avoid that, by making this the default in
some way ? If I just leave out the xmlns() I get an error as the
xpointer can't be resolved.
(I'm using xsltproc to process the DB documents.)

Thanks for any help with this,

        Stefan

-- 

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