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Subject: Re: Ruminations on the future of DocBook
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 / Morus Walter <morus.walter@tanto-xipolis.de> was heard to say: | Norman Walsh writes: [...] |> I don't think that's really making things simpler. It's just moving |> the complexity around. Consider the absurd reduction: |> |> <docbook name="book"> |> <docbook name="title">The Book Title</docbook> |> <docbook name="chpater"> |> ... |> |> I don't think anyone would argue that that is really simpler. | | I think that's missing the point. Point taken. But even in the middle ground, you have still have "n" choices whether you have n elements or (n-m) elements and m attributes. | And I think that makes sense in some cases (e.g. the suggested attention | element). | Consider a general DTD or RelaxNG driven xml editor. It will offer | you a list of elements you might insert at the current position. | The longer the list gets, the more difficult it gets to use it | (e.g. xemacs insert tag list for docbook isn't helpful to me at all in | most contexts). | If you group similar elements by using the same element name and distinguish | them by an attribute, you make this selection easier. Well, do you really? Suppose we had admonition with a role attribute. If you want to insert a warning, you have to know to insert an admonition and then set the class attribute value. For schemas that offer a large number of choices, some grouping mechanism is definitely useful, but this is at least in part a UI issue. |> That |> said, there may be cases where it does make sense to merge things. |> We've already got a proposal to do away with a half dozen or more |> ToC-related elements by replacing them with just two or three. |> | Of course the basic question is, where this can be done. | Note that such constructs are already used, e.g. for sgmltag which can | be used for all kinds of markup that can be distinguished by it's | class attribute. And I don't think that it would be better to have | separate elements for each of them. I agree. The element/attribute distinction is partly subjective. Be seeing you, norm - -- Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Before doing someone a favour, http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | make sure that he isn't a Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | madman.--Eugéne Labiche -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/> iD8DBQE/FuVcOyltUcwYWjsRArCAAJwNG5FcLUHAcSJn2T4b+HXHWOhcdgCggRsy dfpQyZWQFJcOzpvzvXyBzr0= =tHWj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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