DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes 10 NOV 2021

WIthout the id on packagesynopsis so we could do an id/idref type of link, I'm leaning toward your suggestion of optional text attribute.

--Scott

On 3/20/22, 9:51 AM, "" <> wrote:
Hi folks,

At the last TC meeting, we decided that I should add a packageref
attribute to the elements that can be inside a packagesynopsis so that
they can refer back to the synopsis even if they aren’t logically
contained inside it.

How should that work?

1. Make it an IDREF attribute, like linkends. That’s tempting except
   that in 5.2, the elements that have linkends actually have
   “common.linking.attributes” so they can use either linkend or
   xlink:href.

2. Ok, do that. Well, that’s tempting except that we don’t usually do
   that on block elements. It would appear to give the various synopsis
   elements the semantics of “thing you can click on”; it would have not
   just xlink:href but all the other xlink:* attributes as well. I
   suppose we could hardcode xlink:actuate to “none”, but I’m not sure
   anyone would care.

3. The only “block element with links” I can think of is annotation. For
   the “annotations” and “annotates” attributes, we punted the question
   and made them text attributes. That leaves the semantics up to the
   processor. You don’t get any kind of link checking during validation,
   but at the same time, you can have annotations in separate files and
   you don’t get broken link errors. The semantics of annotation is
   explicit about this, an annotation with no referents doesn’t apply;
   I’m not sure that’s what we’d want for packageref.

4. Wait a minute, the packagesynopsis isn’t (necessarily) identified by
   an xml:id at all! It’s identified by its <package>. It definitely
   shouldn’t be a IDREF! This pushes validation even further into the
   processing tools, but they’re pretty capable these days.

On the weight of 3 and 4, and for simplicities sake, I think
“packageref” as an optional text attribute is the best answer.

Anyone want to argue for something else?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh < 
>
https://nwalsh.com/
> The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is
> generally employed only by small children and large nations.--David
> Friedman