Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Aliases?

[Yann Dirson <ydirson at fr dot alcove dot com>]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 11:08:09PM +0100, Olivier Chapuis wrote:
> 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>.

A generic solution, called "architectures", is available since a
number of years in the SGML world.  If you're using the SGML tools to
process your XML documents, you can easily get this functionality.

Basic principles: you declare your own DTD to inherit the DocBook DTD,
you declare that your own elements/attributes map to specific
elements/attributes in the parent DTD, and you ask openjade to process
according to the parent DTD instead of the child one: no need to
change the stylesheets, except if you want to make use of the
inheritance relationship.

Caveats:

- the error checking for architecture-related command-line args in
openjade is flaky, showing the functionality is not in widespread use

- the mappings are to be written in a specific syntax (inside a PI)

- it looks like there are 2 syntaxes in different tutorials, one
probably refering to an early draft of the standard.  That does not
make it easy to get started.

- if you want a valid document, you still have to write a full child
DTD (or use the DocBook DTD hooks to customize it as desctibed in
DocBook-TDG)


In short, it would be good to have a HOWTO document showing how to use
that.  I'll try to bring my test samples from home - my box is
disconnected ATM.


Some URLs:

An example with XML:
	http://www.isogen.com/papers/archintro.html

An architecture example from Norm:
	http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/walshLiterateDProg.html

On OASIS cover pages:
	http://xml.coverpages.org/archForms.html

HTH,
-- 
Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Technical support manager                Responsable de l'assistance technique
Senior Free-Software Consultant          Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres
Debian developer (dirson@debian.org)                        Développeur Debian