Re: [generguide-devel] Experiments with xinclude

[Sean W. <se...@ya...>]

--- Cameron Shorter <ca...@sh...> wrote:
> I've created a demo file which uses xinclude to
> reference a variable.  See 
> attached.
> The good news is xsltproc will process it.
> cvs update -d .
> cp x.xml generguide/guide
> cd generguide/guide
> xsltproc --novalid --xinclude
> ../docbook-xsl/html/docbook.xsl x.xml  > x.html
> 
> The bad new is that XXE doesn't recognise the xpath.
>  :(
> Sean, I don't suppose you can find an editor which
> will handle x.xml?

I use Oxygen, so I am sitting with Xerces and Xalan.
But if I edit under Oxygen, there is no problem.
Mainly because it is not trying to be half WYSIWYG:-)
Couldn't't resist.
I will try it under Morphon and see if it works, when
I get a chance.

> 
> The other problem is that the <xinclude> tag
> requires 2 lines of text for one 
> variable, compared to an ENTITY which only takes one
> word.
> 
> I'd like to look around and see what other
> alternatives we have.  ENTITIES are 
> starting to look more attractive to me again.
> 

Yep. This also bothers me. But it's a trade. To me
entities are the way if you are prepared to give up
the notion that every document needs to be
independently validated and hence transformable.

There is another problem. Larger IMHO. Modular
documentation means that a document may xref to an ID
that is not contained in the current document or any
of siblings. If the ID is in the Child document, it is
valid. If the ID is in the Parent it is invalid,
unless validation starts from the root document. If
not you need to perform an additional process to
resolve all links in a separate file. Like Bob Stanton
suggests at SageHill.

There is no easy answer. Unless you want to create an
authoring application that abstracts all aspects of
XML Publishing and hence protects the author from
these types of issues. Arbortext did it nicely.
http://www.arbortext.com/

If you want to pay the price which IMHO is reasonable.

Sean Wheller

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