RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: Aliases?

[David Cramer <dcramer at broadjump dot com>]

Olivier,
I think of helping the author mark up text without doing too much typing as the role of the editor. Most xml editors understand DTDs and/or schemas and offer some kind of help. In emacs with psgml mode, tab completion and contextual menus allow you to enter tags without typing the full tag name, prevents you from entering a tag where it isn't allowed, and preserves the self-describing nature of the markup. XMetaL and other editors <see the tools section of the docbook Wiki http://www.docbook.org/wiki/moin.cgi/; Here's a page that has lots of shortcuts for emacs + psgml mode: http://www.snee.com/bob/sgmlfree/emcspsgm.html> have similar features. Also, consider using the editor's macro language for very frequently used markup. I'd encourage you to let a good editor do that work and save yourself the overhead of maintaining a shadow customization layer for the xsls and dtd. 

David 

> I think that some inline tags are too long. I would like to
> use aliases. For example I would like to be able to use
> <f> in the place of <filename>.
> 
> At the style-sheet level I can add
> 
> <xsl:template match="f">
>   <xsl:call-template name="inline.monoseq"/>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> but of course this solution is bad. Is there a more generic
> solution? Something that look like "#define f filename".