DOCBOOK: Re: newbie Q's about Simplified DocBook 1.0b2

[Mike Brown <mike at skew dot org>]

Norman Walsh wrote:
> Yes. One of the factors that contributed to the design of Simplified
> was the design of HTML which forbids blocks in paragraphs.

Good. Although, by the same reasoning, you shouldn't be doing things like
<listitem><para>...</para></listitem> :)

One thing I frequently need to do is something like this:

 · not a para
 · not a para, as well
 · also not a para

That is, each item is relatively brief, at most a sentence or two, but never 
multiple paragraphs. I prefer these to be rendered without separating the 
items with vertical whitespace.

But I need to do that without surrendering the ability to also do this:

 · para 1

   para 2

 · para 3

 · para 4

   para 5

I'm guessing that the latter example is achieved in the usual way:

<listitem>
  <para>para 1</para>
  <para>para 2</para>
</listitem>

etc.

So is there a preferred way to achieve the former example?

> | 2. In my document, I want to provide some examples of command-line input and
> | program output.
>
> You could just use programlisting.

I thought of that, but I hate to use what is semantically the wrong markup, 
just to achieve a desired rendering effect. I guess that's never stopped me
and everyone else from abusing <blockquote> and numerous other elements in 
HTML, though. But still, I don't want to make the same mistakes with DocBook.

> It sounds like your markup goals may be in excess of what Simplified provides.
> It might be worth considering full DocBook.

Thanks for the advice. Sadly, the full DocBook XSLT stylesheets are too
cumbersome for this project. We (Fourthought) had been using our own, fairly
lightweight stylesheets that supported only the subset of DocBook that we
needed. Now that I know about Simplified DocBook, I thought I'd try porting
the documents to it. It has been a relatively painless process.

I note that the Simplified DocBook .zip doesn't come with any XSLT. 
Are simplified XSLT stylesheets a goal of the project? Did I miss them
somewhere?

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/