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Subject: Re: [docbook] Clean way to insert a "pause" between blocks of paragraphs?
--- BigSmoke <bigsmoke@home.nl> wrote: > Which other XML dialects are taylored specifically > for the purpose of writing non-technical prose? Now > I tend to > (ab)use DocBook for this (or LaTeX, while I dislike > Macro's). None that I've seen. From what I've seen so far, TEI comes closest, but it is primarily for *tagging* pre-existing non-technical prose. (I worked this out after first posting to the group.) For example, I can easily do the semantic coding for what I want as follows: <div type="chapter"> <head>Stuff Happens</head> <div type="chaptersubdiv"> <p>Some stuff happens.</p> </div> <div type="chaptersubdiv"> <p>More stuff happens.</p> </div> </div> <!-- End of Chapter "Stuff Happens" --> The catch is that the TEI DTD doesn't "know" what "chaptersubdiv" means, so to speak. That is, the DTD doesn't specify a particular set of values of the "type" attribute; it can be anything at all (http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/ref-DIVN.html). Of course, in designing an XML dialect to tag pre-existing documents that could be subdivided in non-predictable ways, this sort of openness or ambiguity in the DTD makes sense. But this design decision means that there is no reliable set of "type" attributes that a stylesheet can target, so one has to make up a sensible set of "type" attributes and either find a stylesheet that supports them, if the "type" attribute values are common conventional ones like "chapter," "section," "canto," etc., or create new stylesheet templates to handle the type values, or do a mixture of both. In contrast, the DocBook DTD is more constraining than the TEI DTD, but presents a more static set of semantics for stylesheets to target. The catch is that if the intended semantics of the document aren't supported by DocBook, one is kind of stuck with either customizing DocBook, abusing it, or messing with processing instructions. TANSTAAFL. > I personally have to admit that in tech. docs I can > always > come up with a title for each seperation. It's only > for > non-technical prose that I desire another means to > add a > "pause" or a "seperation". Same here. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com
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