Re: DOCBOOK: Re: marking up keycaps according to their semantics

[Tobias Reif <tobiasreif at pinkjuice dot com>]

Hi Norm


> But the truth of the matter is, I'm not sure this information is worth
> marking up in this level of detail. I'd probably use something much simpler.


I think that it's great if there's the possibility to do it in a simple 
way, but also go with very granular and detailed markup if that's needed.


> What if you want to do something more interesting, like test your
> source to make sure the quick reference includes all the keyboard
> commands actually used.


This requires that the testing tools knows what markup to expect for 
control, alt, etc. Otherwise, it has to be told that in this document, 
"Ctrl" stands for control input, but in this other doc, "C" stands for 
control input. As soon as this tool gets fed a third document, it might 
not work, since it might use "Strg".


> Well, I think I'd be tempted to recognize <keycap>Ctrl</keycap>


What if authors used "C-" (Emacs notation) or "Strg" (German key label) 
or "<C->" (Vim notation)? What if this tool is to be general, and has 
gets fed something other than <keycap>Ctrl</keycap> for control?

> and
> translate it directly into another language without adding more markup
> to make it more "semantic".


I see the latter as necessity. DocBook is mostly (should be 100% IMHO) 
about nothing but about being semantic. If I could markup input as 
input, instead of making up some ASCII rendering, or typing what's 
written on my keyboard, then that would add a lot of semantics, allowing 
for much more flexible processing:

In my transformation layer, I could then specify the rendering; provide 
pics of keycaps, or choose different ASCII renderings, translations, 
abbreviations or expansions (depending on the target audience), etc.

Tobi

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