Re: DOCBOOK: Line breaks

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ "Beckers, Marc" <Marc.Beckers@softwareag.com> was heard to say:
| > | </unorderedlist>
| > 
| > Oh, barf. That's a variablelist and you know it :-)
| 
| Well, we already have a definition list that transforms
| to variablelist. Our unordered list transforms
| to itemizedlist. The former nicely gives us <DL> in HTML,
| the latter <UL>.

But the structure in your example is clearly a variablelist
semantically. Or a definition list of some sort.

If you're saying you're motivated to make this funky <newline/>,
ahem, hack because you want a UL instead of DL in the formatted
output, I must humbly suggest that you're attacking the wrong
end of the problem.

Translate to <variablelist role="whyiwantthisdifferentoutput">
and do The Right Thing with that kind of variablelist.

| > Unknown PIs are ignored. Heck, known PIs at unexpected places
| > are even ignored.
| > 
| 
| I'm not familiar with PIs. Are you saying that if we transformed
| newline to something like <?linebreak?> it would be passed over 
| into the HTML where we could globally change it to <BR>?
| (though our DocBk instances would be littered with these
| "things").

No, I'm saying it would vanish into the bit bucket, never to be
seen in the HTML at all.

| > In XSL, this would be much easier...
| > 
| Our next step...

:-)

| > No, it's purely presentational. What semantic meaning does it
| > have?  And how do you propose to implement your markup on a PDA
| > or speaking cell phone? 
| 
| Slight pause? :-)
| Point conceded, though. I had considered <phrase
| role="breakafter>...</phrase>
| but it was thought to be too "tedious for authors" ;-)

Yep, but at least then you'd know where the beginning and end was.
That'd make it easier to translate it into a proper variable list
for audio transmition<wink/>

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | The fundamental delusion of
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | humanity is to suppose that I am
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    | here and you are out
                                   | there.--Yasutani Roshi