DocBook NG: The “Gin” Release

Volume 7, Issue 199; 11 Nov 2004; last modified 08 Oct 2010

A few minor changes, motivated in part by some documentation experiments that I've been doing.

This is the seventh release of DocBook NG.

This release has just a few minor changes.

An attribution can have multiple personnames. And text, which may be a mistake, I'm not sure.
I added a language attribute to funcsynopsis.
I added a namespace attribute to tag.
It uses the RELAX NG DTD Compatibility annotations to provide default values for the xlink:type attributes.

My principal motivation was to add the language attribute to the funcsynopsis element for some tinkering that I've been doing.

Martini, anyone?

Comments

Oh, blast! I almost made all the changes I needed. In 'Gin', you can't have an 'initializer' in a 'paramdef'. C'est la vie. That's a bug that will be fixed in the next release.

Thanks for defaulted xlink:type. It solves my remark from previous version of schema. But it still means that if you want to have correct XLinks in your document you must process it with some tool that will augment this information from schema. I'm not sure what this will mean for applications that support XLink today. Are they able to do this sort of augmentation? For example Mozilla will not process XLink if there is no xlink:type="simple" and at the same time Mozilla can't read external entities (also means DTD with defaulted/fixed attributes). In this light I'm still not conviced that XLink is the best way for doing linking in DocBook NG. To me it seems that XLink simply doesn't succeded. But I would like to be wrong. One possibility is to fix XLink specification little bit -- for example making xlink:type="simple" default when link type is not specified in other way.

I agree that adding the attribute defaulting doesn't really fix the underlying XLink problem. It just makes me feel a little better.

It may very well be that we'll decide not to use XLink, but I didn't feel like ripping it back out again just yet.

It now seems clear and obvious to me that XLink's semantics should be that applications infer xlink:type="simple" as the default if only xlink:href is specified, but I expect that amending the XLink Recommendation is nearly impossible as it's the center of highly charged debate. More's the pity.