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Re: Proposal #2 for BNF/EBNF markup
- To: docbook at lists dot oasis-open dot org
- Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Proposal #2 for BNF/EBNF markup
- From: "Eve L. Maler" <Eve dot Maler at east dot sun dot com>
- Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2000 15:26:35 -0400
- References: <"Eve L. Maler"'s message of "Wed, 22 Mar 2000 15:53:53 -0500"><4.2.0.58.20000322152856.00ad79b0@abnaki.East.Sun.Com>
- Reply-To: docbook at lists dot oasis-open dot org
At 12:53 PM 4/5/00 -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
>I don't think we need a constraintnote element. How the author
>chooses to indicate constraints should be up to them. For
>example, I think formalparas might work just fine in some
>cases. I particularly don't think that constraintnote should be
>an admonition.
Fair enough, I guess. It does have to be something with a guaranteed
title, though, since the processing expectation is to pick it up and
display it in the production. For DocBook purposes, I guess it doesn't
make sense to force people to encode their constraint text in a consistent
way (if we're not willing to make a constraintnote element), but in a real
authoring environment, I'd want to enforce picking one way to do
it. Constraints are important normative info; you can't be sloppy about them.
>New issues:
>
> - I changed the linking attribute from 'def' to 'linkend' for consistency
Oops, yeah.
> - You give productionset a required title, then didn't use the title in
> your examples. So I made the title optional.
Sorry -- I was giving examples of individual productions, not groups of
productions in a set. In the original XML spec, you'll notice that each of
the productions for which I gave examples is part of a set, which is
named. But I can agree with not requiring the title; e.g., to my
knowledge, it's never used in any TOCs or anything.
> - Making constraint empty requires that the stylesheet be able to generate
> something reasonable. Maybe we should allow it to have content or be
> empty, as per my description of NT above (and not without precedent,
> consider the semantics of 'link' with endterm)
As I noted above, you could just require that it point to something with a
title, so the title can be grabbed and displayed. Alternatively, we could
mandate that the constraint text be stuffed into the constraint element
inside the production, but I'm not crazy about it. I don't want to allow a
title inside the constraint element, because that opens up the possibility
that a constraint that applies n different productions (which happens
sometimes) will be assigned different titles.
>There were some typos in your decls; here's a proper
>customization layer:
Yeah, I did it off the cuff, so I'm not surprised!
Eve
Eve Maler +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center elm @ east.sun.com