[publican-list] Different approach to banning tags and attributes

[Jeff Fearn]

David O'Brien wrote:
> Jeff Fearn wrote:
>> Hi everybody!
>>
>> I have been thinking about the approach taken to banning tags and 
>> attributes and think I have a better way of doing this that the 
>> current process.
>>
>> I'm thinking that making our own DTD that is a subset of the DocBook 
>> DTD would be a better approach. This would allow people using 
>> validating editors, like Kate and Emacs, to limit what tags and 
>> attributes they are using when writing documents, instead of having to 
>> wait until they try to build them.
>>
>> Making it a subset ensures that publican based books can build in any 
>> other DocBook tool chain.
>>
>> Doing this is actually pretty easy to do, see 
>> http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ch05.html
>>
>> Here is an example of a DTD which removes the olink tag, but supports 
>> everything else in the DocBook 4.5 DTD:
>>
>> --- START DTD ----
>>
>> <!ENTITY % olink.module "IGNORE">
>>
>> <!ENTITY % orig-docbook PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN" 
>> "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
>> %orig-docbook;
>>
>> --- END DTD ---
>>
>> It gets a little more complicated to remove attributes from a tag and 
>> keep the tag, but it's not greatly complex.
>>
>> It's possibly we could switch DTDs on either a brand or per book basis 
>> as well, just in case a brand wanted to support those tags we don't 
>> want to support.
>>
>> Discuss!
>>
>> Cheers, Jeff.
>>
> The idea is fine. Sounds like a reasonable way to get rid of some 
> "noise" when marking up doc.
> 
> Who will own the DTD, and be responsible for what is included or not?

The publican team, in consultation with the publican community.

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY