Re: [docbook-apps] A theoretic limitation (was: thoughts on creatinga publishing infrastructure)

["Juan R. Migoya" <jmigoya at telefonica dot net>]

Bob Stayton wrote:

> Have you looked at using XIncludes instead of entities?
> If you use an XInclude processor that handles the XPointer
> syntax (like xsltproc), XIncludes could solve your problem of
> turning a <chapter> module into a <section>.
>
> For example, you write a module that looks like this:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN" "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd";>
> <chapter id="mychapter">
> <title >My Module Title</title>
> <para>This module does ...</para>
> ...
> </chapter>
>
> Then your master book document could pull its content
> into a section container, excluding the <chapter> container:
I am in the process of migrating from DSSSL to XSL, X*, so I can't help 
here, but
it sounds great, and I will try it for myself. Thanks for the advice.

But, after reading the response from Rober P. J. Day to my answer, I began
to suspect there is a theoretic limitation to what he wants to do:

You want a piece of document to be inserted in ANY node of the docbook
structure. *I think you can't design such a submodule*.

The answer from Bob is quite explanative: he suggest a procedure to convert
<chapter> to <section> (and vice versa I guess). Surely, we could use this
procedure to several pairs of docbook tags. But could you transform a
<refentry> into a <chapter> whit the mentioned procedure? Obviously not.
Even more: if it were some <element> allowed as a child of a <section>
but not as a child of a <chapter>, wich *may* be not the case in Docbook
but it is possible nowadays, you couldn't do the trick.

From the Robert message I guess he wants a lot of flexibility here. But I
have serious doubts about the subject. Some SGML/XML gurus here
in this list surely will have better explanations and conclusions than I 
have.

After what I say above, I must admit that *yes*: If you have structured text
then you can do what you want provided you have or build the adecuated
software. If this is the way Robert would like to take, I would suggest
to open another thread about how to structure the documentation and
what custom procedures you should build in order to have a multi
level structured fully rehusable pool of documentation.

Best regards,
Juan R. Migoya
Spain




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