Re: Fwd: ConTeXt FAQ format, XML with DTD

[Simon Pepping <spepping@scaprea.hobby.nl>]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 10:22:56AM +0000, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> Hello again!
> 
> JM's proposal of FAQ format is only for one FAQ entry.
> The following one may contain the whole thing: several "recipes" (FAQ
> entries),
> each in more than one language.

Your DTD has a number of problems.  I have skipped most of this
discussion, so I do not know what you want. But the content models are
very vague: ANY for question and answer, and it seems you assume ANY
for code as well. If you do not specify this more precisely, too much
will be possible and nobody knows what to expect. A content model like
%text;, declared as (#PCDATA|p|code)+, would be better. Schemas have
some extra facilities here, but otherwise I am not sure why they would
be preferable.

The id in %person should be CDATA, as already remarked. Note that this
assumes a tightly organized set of documents. You say nothing about
the author or editor, so you assume that the id resolves into an entry
in another document, and that the renderer knows which document so
that it can generate a hyperlink. You might also use XLink language:
xlink:href="author#hraban", which already indicates that the author
can be found in the document author in the same directory, with the ID
hraban. OTOH, this is less flexible w.r.t. the organization of the
document set.

Note that Docbook has provisions for QandA: qandaset, question,
answer. I think docbook is a prime example of too wide a DTD. But it
is useful to try and devise a DTD that is a subset of Docbook. It
would make your documents processable with generic Docbook tools.

Regards, Simon

-- 
Simon Pepping
email: spepping@scaprea.hobby.nl