RE: Text insets in structured documents such as EDDs

["Lynne A. Price" <lprice@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:32 PM 6/19/01 -0700, Hogan, John T. (ESA) wrote:
>OK, I'll bite. In the case of EDD maintenance, why do you need to enclose
>your insets in a wrapper element at all? Presumably each reusable fragment
>will be contained in its own uniquely named flow on a reference page or in a
>separate holding document. I can't see why the individual fragments need to
>be valid, as long as the EDD is valid.
>
>You could, for example, create a 'Text Format Rules' element with all the
>subrules desired and then save it in separate flow labeled 'MyFormatRule' on
>the reference page. You can then, according to your own suggestion, import
>the MyFormatRule flow as a text inset into every element where you wanted to
>apply those rules. The EDD in the main document flow will still be valid
>even though the MyFormatRule flow on the reference page is invalid.
>
>That doesn't make the incorrect handling of SGMLFragment less of a bug, I
>suppose, but why use it if it's not needed? I know I'm missing something
>here.


John,
  Good question. In some cases, your suggestion will work. Suppose I have
a set of three format rules shared by a bunch of elements. As long as none
of the elements have any other rules, I can create a text inset with
TextFormatRules as the highest-level element. I can live with that
element not being valid at highest level, perhaps marking that error as
a special case so that FM+SGML does not report it each time I validate
the document. If I prefer, I can modify my metatemplate to make TextFormatRules
valid at the highest level.
  In practice, though, the different elements may have individual format rules
as well. For example, I worked on a DocBook project recently in which the
5 admonition elements--Caution, Important, Note, Tip, and Warning--in fact
shared 3 text format rules. However, warnings are in bold, and the other
admonitions are not. Therefore, what I'd like to do is create an SGMLFragment
consisting of the the 3 common rules. Each admonition element has a TextFormatRules
element. For Warning, the TextFormatRules contains the text inset and a fourth
rule that sets the default paragraph font to bold. For the other four elements,
TextFormatRules contains only the text inset.
	--Lynne

Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
lprice@txstruct.com
http://www.txstruct.com

** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **