Re: DOCBOOK: Re: Linking in DocBook V5.0

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 9:51 AM -0800 11/16/01, Bob Stayton wrote:


>>  I'd agree entirely, except that I think the notion of what constitutes
>>  an internal link is going to start to get fuzzy soon. XInclude, for example,
>>  provides functionality very similar to external entities, but whereas all
>>  entities are resolved before DTD validation, XInclude elements won't be.
>>

Not necessarily so. I'm using XInclude with DocBook today, and I 
don't validate until after all the links are resolved. If you want to 
check out the files see 
http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/xmljava/masterbook.xml

>>  So as soon as you <xi:include> the chapters of your book instead of
>>  &chap;ing them, you have to use "external links" to cross chapter
>>  boundaries. Unfortunate, perhaps, but there you have it.
>

No you don't. The links just can't be evaluated until the XIncludes 
are resolved. Again, I have an existence proof: a rather large book 
written in DocBook in which separate files are used for each chapter 
and most code examples, all assembled through XInclude. This is 
written with the unmodified DocBook 4.1.2 DTD, and it all works. The 
only thing that really doesn't work well is that if I generate a PDF 
for one chapter instead of the entire book, then inter-chapter 
cross-references break, but this is not a showstopper, and I could 
probably figure out how to fix it in the style sheets if I cared to 
spend a couple of hours on it.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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