[publican-list] Inline tags within verbatim environment

[David O'Brien]

On 11/23/2011 04:00 PM, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> 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.
> 
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I would mourn the loss of clean_ids.

Perhaps it was created for a particular purpose that may no longer (or
rarely) exist, but clean_ids has proven to be very useful for other
purposes. I know I'm not the only one who uses it; I also know several
people who are against using it. Those sorts of debates will always
exist, and are probably healthy.

Is it not possible to remove only those aspects of xmlClean that are not
used, and retain clean_ids? If I were a coder I would happily get
involved in this exercise, but I'm an end user who sees the potential
loss of a very useful tool.

-- 

David O'Brien
Senior Content Author
Engineering Content Services (ECS)
Red Hat Asia Pacific Pty Ltd
+61 7 3514 8189


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