Re: [docbook] DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 15 September2004

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Elliotte Harold wrote:

> I'm not sure what you mean by "optional". I assume you mean that in
> the DTD this would be declared as #IMPLIED? If so, I would suggest
> that this be required for verbatim elements, with a  default value of
> "preserve".

I think that we didn't defined default value because the best practise
in these times is to consider schema as a tool solely used for
validation not as a tool that can modify infoset of the document. This
approach is marketed by Relax NG for example. And because the next
generation of DocBook will be primary defined in RNG that can't convey
default attribute values it would cause compatibility problems if we
would use attribute defaulting just for some releases of DocBook schema.

> This would assist any generic processing tools that don't have
> specific knowledge of DocBook, especially formatting tools.

Good point. OTOH I can hardly imagine formatting toolchain that will be 
able to process DocBook in a reasonable way without specific knowledge 
of DocBook. Treatment of whitespaces can be specified in a stylesheet 
and most processing tools (editors, converters and formatters) are 
driven by such stylesheets.

					Jirka

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