(dsssl) Undesired paragraph breaks in generated HTML

[John Kimball <jkimball@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please excuse a question from a puzzled newbie!

We have a local extension to Docbook which we're using to generate RTF- and
HTML-formatted documentation for a project.  The person who did the bulk of
the extension is no longer around.  I need to revise a construction rule.

The problem is that the construction rule is supposed to concatenate
together several chunks of text to yield the output, but the last part is
being placed in a separate paragraph.

Here is (1) What the input looks like, (2) What the desired output and the
undesired actual output looks like, and (3) The code that's doing the dirty
deed:

    <!-- Sample .sgm input: example regrule: ========================== -->
    <regrule>
    <ruleid>AR005</ruleid>
    <description>
      <para>All aardvarks must be leashed.</para>
    </description>
    ...
    </regrule>

    <!-- The desired output (.html) should look like this: ============ -->
    <blockquote> {AR005} All aardvarks must be leashed. </blockquote>

    <!-- Current undesired output looks something like this: ========== -->
    <blockquote> {AR005} <p>All aardvarks must be leashed.</p> </blockquote>

    ;; The .dsl code driving jade looks like this: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    (element (regrule)
      (let  ((ruleid (select-elements (children (current-node)) 
				      (normalize "ruleid")))
	     (description (select-elements (children (current-node)) 
					   (normalize "description")))
	     ...))
      ...
      (make element 
	gi: "blockquote"
	(make sequence
	  (literal " {") 
	  (process-node-list ruleid) 
	  (literal  "} ") 
	  (process-node-list description))))

It looks like the basic problem is that the contents of
<description></description> are within (a sequence of one or more)
<para></para>s.  But I'm leery of trying to fix this at the DTD level,
since the original author was careful to insist on <para></para> in places
like this, to allow a variety of kinds of text to be used in a description.

It is possible to do (literal (data description)) instead of
(process-node-list description); that gets rid of the undesired paragraphs,
but then things like <xref>s get stripped out, too.

I poked around to find a way to insert those three chunks -- " {", ruleid,
and "} " -- into the front of the contents of <description></description>,
within the <para></para>, but I don't understand this stuff well enough to
do that.

What's the best way to handle this?

TIA...

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