simplified assembly

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

I'm following up on my action item to propose a simplified version of assembly. In our 
last meeting, we discussed the complications of including textual content in an 
assembly file, so this proposal removes most of that.  Here are the proposed schema 
changes (in words).

1.  Remove the "content" versions of module and resource.  This goes back to the 
original design of putting all content in resource files that are referenced by 
resourceref.

2.  Remove bibliography, glossary, index, and toc elements from module and structure.
Where you need to insert such an element, use module with a renderas attribute. For 
the case where you need an empty index element as a placeholder for a generated index, 
then use an empty module:  <module renderas="index"/>. This approach avoids including 
special elements in the module content model.

3.  Replace info with assemblyinfo to make it clear that this metadata is only about 
the assembly elements themselves. It could have a different content model from info, 
since it would not carry any text to be rendered in the output, such as title, 
titleabbrev, etc.

4.  Remove title, titleabbrev, and subtitle elements from module (see next item).

5.  Keep the override element in module and structure.  That would be the only place 
that text content would be allowed in an assembly, and would include title, 
titleabbrev, and subtitle elements among others.  If someone uses this optional 
element and still needs translation, they can restrict the translation of the assembly 
file to the text elements inside any override elements.

6.  For those who don't want any content in their assembly but need to override the 
info for a given resource, allow override to have a resourceref attribute that points 
to a resource that references a file containing the info overrides.  One could even 
have several overrides if they are conditional and only one is selected.

7.  And the change I proposed earlier: add resourceref to structure to allow it to 
reference a resource for the root element and front matter.  Keeping structure as a 
separate element from module for the root element gives us the flexibility for it to 
have different attributes or content for that critical location.


Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net