Handling HTML and FO semantics

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

Hello world,

A few days ago, I wanted to add a rel attribute to a generated HTML
link. There's no obvious way to do this, so I just banged in an
extension to allow html:rel (actually, html:*) attributes on link
(actually, everywhere):

  <link xlink:href="somewhere" html:rel="whatever">...</link>

I updated the customization layer to simply copy html:* attributes
to * attributes in the rendered output:

  <xsl:for-each select="@html:*">
    <xsl:attribute name="{local-name(.)}" select="."/>
  </xsl:for-each>

Now today, I've coincidentally stumbled across this:

  <imagedata fileref="figs/print/db5d_ref10.pdf" format="PDF"
             role="keep-together"/>

And somewhere down in the XSL FO stylesheets or my customization
there's presumably some logic that says if
contains(@role,'keep-together') then generate a keep-together
attribute on the generated FO.

I wonder if it wouldn't be better expressed as

  <imagedata fileref="figs/print/db5d_ref10.pdf" format="PDF"
             fo:keep-together="always"/>

I'm tempted to suggest allowing (any) namespace-qualified attributes on
DocBook elements to enable this sort of thing.

On the one hand, it's not terribly "clean". On the other, it's terribly
convenient.

I suppose a cleaner alternative would be to use PIs:

  <?html rel="whatever"?>
  <link xlink:href="somewhere">...</link>

and

  <?xslfo keep-together="always"?>
  <imagedata fileref="figs/print/db5d_ref10.pdf" format="PDF"/>

but it's not obvious to me that the extra complexity is worth the
marginal improvement in markup "purity".

What do you think?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Wisdom is only a comparative
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | quality, it will not bear a single
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | definition.--Marquess of Halifax

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