[docbook-tc] xref style examples

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

Following up on my proposal[1] for a keyword-based method
for selecting content for the generated text of an xref,
I've done a test implementation and produced an output
document you can view.  It's at:

http://sagehill.net/xml/xrefstyle.html

This is a sample book whose preface includes many
examples of selecting label, title, and page
number keywords in an xref's 'xrefstyle' attribute.
Besides the examples in the text, there are two
tables of various keyword combinations, one table
for HTML rendering and one for FO rendering.
The FO rendering is faked in this HTML file to show
the page numbers.

The idea here is to permit writers to select components
of the generated text without having to write a
customization layer.  And the selections have to work in
both html and fo output.  If someone wants to go beyond
these relatively simple selections, then they can
write their own named xref style templates.
There may also be languages for which this fixed
ordering of components would not work.

Regarding page numbers, the current default style for page
citation in Norm's XSL stylesheets is "[5]".  The page,
Page, and pageabbrev examples are styles that I added to
the gentext file en.xml as alternate styles.  These would
be available in the stock stylesheets, and could be
customized as well.

It occurs to me that a "nopage" keyword might be handy to
turn off the page reference for individual xrefs when
general citations are turned on.  There are times when a
page reference is not desirable.

Comments welcome.

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200210/msg00002.html
-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
Caldera International, Inc.                 fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@caldera.com