Re: Customizable

[Martijn van Beers <martijn eekeek org>]

On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 02:46:26PM -0600, Kevin Breit wrote:
> Hey,
> 	I am curious what people think about changing stylesheets if the markup
> doesn't work for you.
> 	The example in case is that someone needs to move his <author> tags
> into a section, as the list is too long for good use.  So, he wants to
> move <authors> into a section.
> 	Should we allow changing stylesheets or should we encourage people to
> use a common one and either deal with the changes or tag around them?

Neither of course. You don't really want everyone to write their own
stylesheets, as that will lead to a big mess with every document looking
different.

Even worse is doing silly things in docbook just to get around a stylesheet
'problem'. That way you get way more problems for everyone trying to do
something with all the documents. In the example above it would get so
much more difficult to get a nice list of all the docs with their title
and authors for example, which should be a trivial stylesheet if everyone
just used the <[article|book|whatever]info> tagset as it is supposed to
be used.

What you really want is to adapt the generic gnome stylesheet to work nicely
in fringe cases too. So if you really think the default way of listing a lot
of authors is a problem, you adapt the stylesheet to make the author list
more dense in cases where there's more than X authors.

That way, you keep authors from having to deal with the way the document
looks (*the* advantage of the content/layout seperation after all), and
you get to continue doing nifty things on sets of documents without having
to go to contortions to make them work on every document just because it
"didn't look good" to the author.


Martijn