Re: Making GNOME documentation suitable for different distros.

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sat, 2003-10-18 at 02:43, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 22:54, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 20:12, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > [...]
> > > I don't see any awkwardness with using XInclude.  XIncluded files can
> > > XInclude other files.  Files included with a SYSTEM entity can't contain
> > > an XML declaration or a DOCTYPE declaration, because it's a just a text
> > > slurp.  Since all of the GNOME docs currently use entites to split the
> > > docs into smaller files, each file would have to rely on being included
> > > in the master file to have the entity declarations.  This makes it hard
> > > to work with each file on its own.
> > 
> > In case it looked like I missed a point: you already have include the
> > sub-document into the master to do any validation or processing unless
> > you are writing very simplistic documents that do not use any entities
> > at all. So no quotation marks (“ and ”), no em- or
> > en-dashes, etc. I'm not adding to the ridiculousness of the situation in
> > any way -- it's already awkward at that point. That is exactly why
> > XInclude is a good idea for document fragments.
> 
> Right.  And I'd like to get away from this.  Actually, I would have far
> less of an objection to the use of entities for simple substitutions if
> we were using XInclude for the document inclusions.  If that were the
> case, each XML file could define the entities itself (or, of course,
> pull them from a common entities file), and could be processed alone.

I agree completely. :-)

Malcolm