docbook-tc — archive

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

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 <ndw@nwalsh.com> 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 Attachment: signature.asc Description: PGP signature