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Subject: Modular doc processing model
Following up on the modular DocBook proposals so far, I'd like to seek clarification on processing expectations of assembly elements. My first impression is that an assembly element would be preprocessed to resolve all resources, with the result being a valid DocBook XML document with all the content pulled in, profiled, and relationships resolved. That resolved document would then be fed into a second process using a DocBook stylesheet for rendering. Like profiling, these two phases could be pipelined, or they could be separated so the intermediate result can be examined. At least, this is likely how I would handle assemblies. This allows the assembly process to generate assembly errors, and then halt if necessary before passing the result to a formatting stylesheet, where likely many fallout error messages would result due to incomplete input. If this is the processing model, then what happens when an assembly element contains more than one structure element after profiling? One could imagine each structure being rendered as a separate output document. But if one structure is intended for print and another for help, then they would likely need different handling in assembly and different stylesheets downstream. Also, Larry's example has a tutorial structure referenced as module of the user.guide structure. It isn't clear whether the tutorial is meant to be a separate output. For that matter, the element name <assembly> implies *one* assembly, not multiple assemblies that are implied by multiple structures. Certainly this issue should be left to the processing application, where if you want just one output you pass in a parameter to specify the xml:id of the structure you want generated. But is there a semantic explanation of what an assembly with multiple structures means? Or we could say an assembly contains one structure, and any nested structures or alternative structures must exist elsewhere and be pulled in by reference as modules into the single structure in an assembly. Bob Stayton Sagehill Enterprises bobs@sagehill.net
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