[publican-list] Inline tags within verbatim environment

[Jeff Fearn]

On 11/15/2011 05:38 PM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I don't have the habit to discuss decisions of maintainers but in this
> particular case I would like the feedback of the wider community
> on this specific bug report that got closed as NOTABUG despite
> feedback from the upstream community proving that publican
> was doing the weird thing here.
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=752851
>
> The upstream docbook-xsl stylesheets do preserve whitespaces and
> linebreaks in inlines elements within verbatim environment.
>
> Do any of you have any document where you need the current Publican
> behaviour of converting any sequence of whitespace/newlines to a single
> space in inline tags within verbatim environments?
>
> To me this behaviour just ensures that I'll never be able to use
> any inline element within a verbatim tag because I'll lose
> the formatting of my<screens>  <programlisting>  and so on.
> It's really counter-productive IMO and I can't really see who
> would like to lose his formatting...
>
> Cheers,

For me this raises a larger issue, should Publican be interfering with 
the source XML at all?

XmlClean exists for two historical reasons, neither of which still 
exist. Migrating old html/sgml content to XML, enforcing certain 
standards are met.

The old content was migrated years ago and that process required a bunch 
of scripts that never made it in to Publican ... they were horrific 
people, horrific!

We backed away from enforcing standards sometime ago, see the death of 
STRICT mode.

Given that neither of the reasons the code exists are of any relevance 
any more, maybe we should just remove XmlClean completely. This would 
see the death of clead_ids as well, but that was specifically for 
migrating content and has never been supported for general use.

Comments?

Cheers, Jeff.