DOCBOOK: Re: newbie Q's about Simplified DocBook 1.0b2

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Mike Brown <mike@skew.org> was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh wrote:
|> Yes. One of the factors that contributed to the design of Simplified
|> was the design of HTML which forbids blocks in paragraphs.
|
| Good. Although, by the same reasoning, you shouldn't be doing things like
| <listitem><para>...</para></listitem> :)

No, that's not the same thing at all. The content model of listitem in
DocBook is required to be block content. You can't not put the para in
there.

| I'm guessing that the latter example is achieved in the usual way:
|
| <listitem>
|   <para>para 1</para>
|   <para>para 2</para>
| </listitem>
|
| etc.
|
| So is there a preferred way to achieve the former example?

I consider it a browser bug that

  <ol compact="compact">
  <li><p>para 1</p></li>
  <li><p>para 2</p></li>
  </ol>

does not render the way you want. If you want to work around that bug,
I suggest a stylesheet tweak, driving off the spacing="compact"
attribute on the DocBook orderedlist, perhaps.

|> | 2. In my document, I want to provide some examples of command-line input and
|> | program output.
|>
|> You could just use programlisting.
|
| I thought of that, but I hate to use what is semantically the wrong markup, 
| just to achieve a desired rendering effect. I guess that's never stopped me
| and everyone else from abusing <blockquote> and numerous other elements in 
| HTML, though. But still, I don't want to make the same mistakes with DocBook.

Right, and with full DocBook, I'd never encourage you to do so. But if
you want to stick with Simplified, you're going to be forced to make
much more coarse-grained semantic choices.

|> It sounds like your markup goals may be in excess of what Simplified provides.
|> It might be worth considering full DocBook.
|
| Thanks for the advice. Sadly, the full DocBook XSLT stylesheets are too
| cumbersome for this project. We (Fourthought) had been using our own, fairly

Ahem. Maybe you'd like to start a thread about this on the
docbook-apps list? :-) I'm not sure what you mean by cumbersome,
except perhaps that they're a bit, uhm, large.

| I note that the Simplified DocBook .zip doesn't come with any XSLT. 
| Are simplified XSLT stylesheets a goal of the project? Did I miss them
| somewhere?

Nope. Simplified DocBook is a proper subset of DocBook, therefore the
standard DocBook stylesheets process them without any trouble.

I've occasionally toyed with (and at least once started to build) a
tool that would analyze the full DocBook stylesheets and automagically
produce a stylesheet that was equivalent but included only the
templates that might be relevant to Simplified. Turns out to be a
fairly tedious undertaking, and in the end given the use of
apply-imports and the like, probably not worth the effort. (IMHO,
naturally.)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | As a general rule, the most
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | successful man in life is the man
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | who has the best
                                   | information.--Benjamin Disraeli