Re: [docbook] Adding a table element to DocBook 4.3

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

George Szabo <George_Szabo@hyperion.com> writes:

> I'm new to Docbook, and am trying to add an element for a borderless
> table <tableBorderless>.  I've created the following customization
> layer, and it seems to work correctly.  However, before proceeding
> further, I'm hoping one of you can tell me whether I did this correctly?
> (I'm a bit nervous about whether what I'm doing will break something
> else).  Thanks!
> 
> <!ENTITY  % local.formal.class "|tableBorderless">
> <!ENTITY % DocBookDTD  PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.3//EN"
>                        "http://docbook.org/xml/4.3/docbookx.dtd";>
> %DocBookDTD;
> 
> <!ELEMENT tableBorderless %ho; (%tbl.table.mdl;)>
> 
> <!ATTLIST tableBorderless
>      frame           CDATA   #FIXED "none"
>        colsep         CDATA   #FIXED "0"
>         rowsep        CDATA  #FIXED "0"
>         %tbl.table.att;
>         %bodyatt;
>         %secur;

That all looks OK to me. But now you'll need to create an
stylesheet customization layer to process it, right? Because the
standard stylesheets won't have any idea what a <tableBorderless>
is. And if you'll need to do stylesheet customization anyway, why
not just skip creating a new element, and just use something like
<table role="borderless">, and tweak the stylesheets to process that?

Or actually, why not just use <table border="none" colsep="0" rowsep="0">?

Adding a custom element just to get different presentation effects
seems like a lot more work than just marking up the tables in your
doc instances with a few extra attributes.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael Smith
http://sideshowbarker.net/

smime.p7s