Re: DOCBOOK: Why no MAP/SHORTREFs in DocBook?

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Trevor Jenkins <trevor@suneidesis.com> was heard to say:
| In using the DocBook DTD in anger recently I've found it very

In anger?

| inconvenient that there is no use of the MAP feature or at the least
| hooks, by which I mean parameter entity declarations, so the user can
| define them themselves. The sort of thing I'd expected to be part of
| DocBook was for &RS;&RE; sequences to be interpreted as occurences of a
| para start tag. Even having those sequences defined as maps belonging to
| para, simplepara, or formalpara so that a sequence of theses elements
| are be marked-up with little effort on my part would be an advance.

You can easily construct a customization layer that adds the
appropriate declarations, if you really want to support this in your
environment.

All of my experience with minimization lead me inexorably to the
conclusion that minimization was a painful impediment to interchange
and understandability.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Simplicity is always a
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | virtue.--Edward Abbey
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |