Prosposed changes to Programlisting

[steven.cogorno@sun.com (Steven Cogorno)]

The DocBook TC has received a request to create a new element to contain the
contents of files.  Currently the recommended tagging for this content is
programlisting or literallayout.  However, these elements don't convey any
semantic meaning.

We would like to try to avoid adding a new element as the current set is
already fairly large.  One suggestion was to combine programlisting and
literallayout into a new element with a more generalized name. This element
would have an attribute to distinguish between the types of literal content.

This would be rather signifcant change to users of the programlisting and
literallayout elements.  Our question for the user community are:

- Do you see a signifncant enough need to change the status quo (using
  programlisting for files)?

- Would you rather see a completely new element or the user of an attribute
  to qualify an existing element?
  
- Do you have any other suggestions for marking up this type of data that
  we haven't thought of?
  
We appreciate any feedback you might have.


-Steve Cogorno