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Hi Chris, Wouldn't using a PI such as the following achieve the same effect -- without requiring any DTD customization? <?entity name='wrkngName'?> Or better yet, so that you didn't need to hard-code your variablerefence content into your stylesheets, something like the following - <?entity name='wrkngName' uri='http://foo.com/entities.xml'?> ...where the content at http://foo.com/entities.xml is whatever you otherwise would have hard-coded into your stylesheet. Is there an advantage to using an element for this instead of a PI? Also, as far as DocBook not really be intended to be used as-is, but intended to be customized for specific purposes: that may be the reality for commercial organizations using DocBook, but I don't think it holds true for the open-source doc authoring community (FreeBSD doc project, LDP, KDE doc people, etc.), which (for a lot of reasons) needs a common, stable, "unextended" DocBook that's supported by the standard off-the-shelf DocBook XSLT stylesheets (and other processing apps; for example, Steve Cheng's docbook2X). I don't think it's practical or advisable for individual open-source doc authoring groups to unilaterally extend the DocBook schema to add elements for purposes like this (that is, DOCTYPE-less entity/variable references). Of course, if we could all get together and develop and agree on a standard way to do it, whether it meant adding a new element to the DocBook schema, or coming up with solution that wasn't tied to a specific DTD/schema, we'd all be better off. It seems like we wouldn't need to come up with something completely new -- we've already got the PI mechanism and support for it in XSLT. It'd basically just amount to agreeing on what names to use in the PI (for example, "variablereference" or "entity"). --Mike "Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org> writes: > At 15:50 29/4/04, Paul Heinlein wrote: > >If you use a tag like <variablereference/>, don't you lose the ability > >to validate your documents? Am I missing or misunderstanding > >something? > > Sort of, and yes. > > DocBook is really not intended to be used as-is; it's intended to be > customized for your specific purposes. That's why (in the DTD version) > there are all those parameter entities. With the XSDL version, it's a > little trickier; you basically have to comment out or modify the > definitions in the original DocBook schemas, and replace them with your own > definitions, but the principle is the same. > > In this case, for my clients, I've substantially modified the DocBook > schema, so the use of this element is valid just about anywhere character > data is allowed. The front matter (basically bookinfo) has a few > additional elements to allow storing the values of some of those variables > (product version, etc.). > > ~Chris
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