Re: DocBook supplement and Netscape9?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Doug du Boulay <ddb@owari.msl.titech.ac.jp> was heard to say:
[...]
| I've been wondering about the possibility of an embedded DocBook 
| <supplement>, to appear as the final element in a DocBook <article>, 
| <book> or <part>. This would provide a centralised collection point for 
| associated data in generic 
| external XML formats, such as:
|
|   XDF (http://xml.gsfc.nasa.gov/XDF/XDF_home.html )
|   XSIL (http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/SDA/xsil/ )
| or
|   ESML (http://esml.itsc.uah.edu/ )
|
| The intention is that some of this supplementary data could be XSLT 
| formatted into, for instance, tables inserted at appropriate placeholder 
| positions in the body text of the article. 
| I don't know what the form of those placeholders would need to be, open
| for suggestions...
| The default processing expectation would be to otherwise ignore everything 
| within the <supplement>ary data section. But for browsing DocBook XML, 
| (with Netscape!) it would be nice if the raw <supplement>ary data could 
| also be viewed in some kind of generic hierarchical mode, with collapsible 
| and expandable branch nodes (in the manner of XMLSpy?). 

Can you provide a concrete example of what you might want to put in
supplement? It sounds like this is stuff that belongs in <info>, but
I'm not sure I really understand what you want to put in there.

| Secondly it would also be nice to be able to take something akin to the 
| DocBook Website autolayout.xml file, describing all articles in a given 
| journal issue or topic map, an olink.xml database (or connection to such) 
| and the raw XML DocBook <article> and format that with a hierarchical 
| table of contents.
| The aforementioned embedded collapsible <supplement> hierarchy would 
| appear at the end of the article body.

Yes, I think it would be handy to have an external ToC format that
could pull pieces together. I'm thinking of building something like
this. But probably not before I come back from vacation.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Men of genius do not excel in any
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | profession because they labor in
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | it, but they labor in it because
                                   | they excel.--William Hazlitt

PGP signature