Proposed mechanism for profiling based on output type to be compatible with assembly

["Rowland, Larry" <larry.rowland@hp.com>]

The assembly model for controlling output based on the format that is being produced is based on the output statement.

The output statement actually performs a number of functions, including specifying names of files to which content is delivered and the markup to be used to interpret the content, as well as controlling the presence or absence of content in a specific rendered output.  In addition to the standard common attributes, the specific attributes that are added to control inclusion based on format being rendered are:

   format
   suppress

The format attribute allows a list of one or more formats to be considered and suppress is a binary that allows the user to specify whether the content wrapper containing the output element is to be included or excluded (include if suppress is not specified or set to false, exclude if it is set to true).  This was intended to provide greater flexibility for complex document construction.

Short or adopting the output element to be a child of pretty much any element in DocBook (which seems somewhat excessive, given that the assembly mechanism was added to provide that type of flexibility in putting together complex assemblies of content), the simplest expedient would be at add a format attribute to the common attributes and allow the normal processing expectations for the common effectivity attributes to apply to format.  It would be desirable to allow it to contain a list of formats, since sometimes the filtering might be desirable for all HTML output formats, such as Webhelp and HTML, versus print output such as PDF; being able to provide a list of formats to filter against would allow this to be accomplished.

Regards,
Larry Rowland