Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Q & A TOC missing literal elements

[Vladimir G Ivanovic <vladimir at acm dot org>]

Bob,

<sigh>It looks like I'm going to have to learn more about XSL...</sigh>

Thanks very much for your explanation. It's not what I wanted to
hear, but "C'est la vie!".

--- Vladimir

Vladimir G. Ivanovic                        http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St.                                         vladimir@acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447                                 +1 650 678 8014

"BS" == Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com> writes:

  >> From: Vladimir G Ivanovic <vladimir@acm.org>
  >> 
  >> The <literal> elements in my <question> elements are not passed through
  >> to the Q & A's table of contents. Is there something I'm not doing that
  >> should be?

  BS> It is not something you are doing wrong. The TOC entries for
  BS> Q&A will only produce plain text, based on the way the XSL stylesheet
  BS> is currently written.  If you want the details,
  BS> here is the relevant template in html/qandaset.xsl:

  BS> <xsl:template match="question" mode="qandatoc.mode">
  BS>   <xsl:variable name="firstch" select="(*[name(.)!='label'])[1]"/>
 
  BS>   <dt>
  BS>     <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="label.markup"/>
  BS>     <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
  BS>     <a>
  BS>       <xsl:attribute name="href">
  BS>         <xsl:call-template name="href.target"/>
  BS>       </xsl:attribute>
  BS>       <xsl:value-of select="$firstch"/>
  BS>     </a>
  BS>   [stuff deleted]
                  
  BS> This lines sets the variable 'firstch':

  BS>   <xsl:variable name="firstch" select="(*[name(.)!='label'])[1]"/>

  BS> The XPath expression selects the first child node of
  BS> <question> that is not a <label> element.  In your example,
  BS> this is the <para> element inside your <question>.

  BS> Further down when it is forming the <a> link, the text it
  BS> uses is produced using:

  BS>    <xsl:value-of select="$firstch"/>

  BS> When you use <xsl:value-of> on a node, it just outputs the
  BS> text of the node and its children, so all element markup is
  BS> lost.

  BS> Since I didn't write the stylesheet, I can only speculate
  BS> that this was done to simplify processing.  A <question>
  BS> element can contain any number of DocBook elements, and the
  BS> TOC processing would have to handle those elements
  BS> in the TOC context.  If instead of using <xsl:value-of>
  BS> you were to use <xsl:apply-templates>, you'd be putting a <para>
  BS> as well as a <literal> in your TOC, or else the stylesheet would
  BS> have to disable <para> and many other elements when in TOC
  BS> mode to prevent that.

  BS> A <qandaentry> doesn't permit a <title> to put in
  BS> the TOC, so this method simplies dealing with 
  BS> the range of possible elements that might
  BS> appear in a question.

  BS> bobs
  BS> Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
  BS> Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
  BS> Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
  BS> Caldera International, Inc.                 fax:   (831) 429-1887
  BS>                                             email: bobs@caldera.com

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