Re: [Usability] Re: Making GNOME documentation suitable for different distros.

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 09:48, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 06:12, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > Maybe I'm missing some catch.  With a lot of these technologies, you
> > only begin to see the problems when you start pushing them to their
> > limits.  I'll admit I haven't used XInclude in anything really taxing,
> > so if it starts to break down somewhere, I wouldn't know.
> 
> It might be that what you are missing is that there are two distinct,
> very different uses of entities being talked about.
> (1) including whole files or other resources
> (2) using entities as string replacement macros, like #define in C.
> 
> <!ENTITY companyname "Barefoot Computing">
> [. . .]
> <p>Welcome to &companyName;'s Web site!</p>
> 
> In this 2nd use, xinclude can't always be used -- simple example:
> <img href="&iconLocation;/filechooser.png" />
> 
> (you can't use xinclude to substitute within an attribute value).

Nope, I didn't miss that.  What's being proposed is to use an entity to
include an entire file which defines more entities to be used as string
replacement macros.  Entities can, of course, can be used in plenty of
ways that XInclude can't, such as for unbalanced tags, or for use in
attributes (as you point out).

I just don't see those uses as relevant to this issue.  DocBook is very
intelligent about not putting any real content inside of attributes
(unlike, say, HTML).

> Someone mentioned using fragment identifiers with XInclude; I should
> also point out that the XInclude draft is likely to change and may well
> deprecate the use of fragment identifiers,  possibly moving them to
> a separate attribute.

That would be very unfortunate.  Section 4.2.2 of the XPointer Working
Draft states

<quote>
A bare name stands for the same name provided as the argument of a
location step using the id() function.
</quote>

So is XInclude going to drop XPointer support?  Or is XPointer going to
drop the bare-name-shortcut bit?  Either seems very silly to me.

--
Shaun