Re: Hacking (make element) in the DocBook stylesheets

Subject: Re: Hacking (make element) in the DocBook stylesheets
From: James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 20:15:59 +0700
Hacking the stylesheet is the wrong way to solve that problem.

The reason the SGML backend does that is that if it doesn't add
whitespace anywhere, the output would often have extremely long lines
(sometimes the entire output would be a single line), but it doesn't
know anything about the semantics of the output DTD, so it is only safe
to add linebreaks inside tags.

It would be easy to hack the SGML backend to add an option not to add
any whitespace, or to otherwise customize the whitespace handlings.

Alternatively just run the output through a HTML pretty printer (like
Dave Raggett's tidy).

James

Norman Walsh wrote:
> 
> Hello world,
> 
> I'm toying with the following idea: replace all calls to (make
> element) in the DocBook HTML Stylesheet with a function call,
> (make-element), that can generate more reasonable line breaks.
> The (make-element) function manages to take exactly the same
> arguments as (make element).
> 
> Roughly half the time, it seems like the right thing to do.  The
> rest of the time it seems like a really bad idea.
> 
> On the plus side, the default output from the stylesheet would
> look more like this:
> 
>   <HTML>
>   <HEAD>
>   <TITLE></TITLE>
> 
> than this:
> 
>   <HTML
>   ><HEAD
>   ><TITLE
>   ></TITLE
> 
> On the minus side,
> 
>  - Getting really reasonable line breaks all the time might require a
>    fair amount of work in make-entity
> 
>  - It would have some performance implications
> 
>  - Existing customization layers would still work, but would contain a
>    mixture of styles
> 
>  - There might be implications that have never occurred to me
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?
> 
>                                         Cheers,
>                                           norm
> --
> Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx>      | The man with ten children is
> http://nwalsh.com/                 | better off than the one with ten
>                                    | thousand fonts of type, because
>                                    | the man with ten children doesn't
>                                    | want any more.
> 
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Current Thread
  • Hacking (make element) in the DocBook stylesheets
    • Norman Walsh - from mail1.ability.netby web4-1.ability.net (8.8.5/8.6.12) with ESMTP id JAA18493Fri, 28 Aug 1998 09:15:03 -0400 (EDT)
      • James Clark - from mail1.ability.netby web4-1.ability.net (8.8.5/8.6.12) with ESMTP id JAA19890Fri, 28 Aug 1998 09:33:51 -0400 (EDT) <=
        • Norman Walsh - from mail1.ability.netby web4-1.ability.net (8.8.5/8.6.12) with ESMTP id LAA28112Fri, 28 Aug 1998 11:01:22 -0400 (EDT)