docbook 'role' attribute leakage

[Stefan Seefeld <stefan dot seefeld at orthosoft dot ca>]

hi there,

I'm searching for ways to put 'use cases', 'requirements', and
other architectural artifacts into my documents. The closest thing I'v
come up with is a variablelist (since the structure as far as
the document is concerned is basically a list). I hope to preserve
a minimal markup so I can provide special display instructions via css,
and the means for this seems to be the ubiquitous 'role' attribute.
Role usually maps to the 'class' attribute in html documents.
However, in my case it appears the 'class' attribute is set to
'variablelist', so the 'role' attribute is lost. (I'm using
<xsl:param name="css.decoration" select="1"/>)

What is going wrong here ?

But speaking of user defined markup, I'm wondering whether there
shouldn't be other ways (beside 'role') to provide more hooks
for user defined structures. In fact, as the content needs to
be generic, I think some generic container which acts similar to
'role' would be best. That would provide all the hooks needed
to deal with such elements in user defined xslt and css code.
May be something equivalent to html's 'div', just as a structural
element. May be a generalization of 'formalpara' where 'para' could
be replaced with anything...?

Another use of such generic decorator elements would be the
ability to automatically generate indexes for them.

Hmm, I hope this all makes some sense...

Best regards,
		Stefan