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

[Trevor Jenkins <trevor at suneidesis dot com>]

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Norman Walsh wrote:

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

As opposed to my theoretical knowledge of it. Easy to miss such elementary
requirements when one's only necessity is to be aware of DocBook.

> | 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.

Except that I then have to document that layer rather than just using your
own book. :-)

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

If it's an impediment to interchange then there's something seriously
wrong with SGML! :-| That a user might get confused with some instances of
it I would agree but then not all users have our experiece or level of 
comfort with SGML. :-)

Regards, Trevor

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