Re: [docbook] Prosposed changes to Programlisting

[Justus.Piater@ULg.ac.be (Justus H. Piater)]

steven.cogorno@sun.com (Steven Cogorno) wrote on Wed, 18 Feb 2004
04:58:13 -0800 (PST):

> 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.

<programlisting> does convey semantic meaning, doesn't it?
<literallayout> doesn't.

> 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.

I would avoid that, since <literallayout> is concerned with layout and
not with semantics. I view <literallayout> as a catch-all for content
for which there is no corresponding semantic markup.

> - Would you rather see a completely new element or the user of an attribute
>   to qualify an existing element?

As I said above, I'd avoid replacing semantic markup by generic,
layout-oriented markup. Reducing the number of elements is a noble
goal, but not at the cost of losing semantics or proliferating
attributes to convey top-level semantics.

> - Do you have any other suggestions for marking up this type of data that
>   we haven't thought of?

I'd like to second Jirka's suggestion to use <textdata> for this
purpose, as I suppose the file content to be displayed is textual :-).

BTW, isn't the original purpose of <textdata> redundant with text-type
XInclude?

Justus

-- 
Justus H. Piater, Ph.D.         http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~piater/
Institut Montefiore, B28        Phone: +32-4-366-2279
Université de Liège, Belgium    Fax:   +32-4-366-2620