Re: Making GNOME documentation suitable for different distros.

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 22:54, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 20:12, Shaun McCance wrote:
> [...]
> > I don't see any awkwardness with using XInclude.  XIncluded files can
> > XInclude other files.  Files included with a SYSTEM entity can't contain
> > an XML declaration or a DOCTYPE declaration, because it's a just a text
> > slurp.  Since all of the GNOME docs currently use entites to split the
> > docs into smaller files, each file would have to rely on being included
> > in the master file to have the entity declarations.  This makes it hard
> > to work with each file on its own.
> 
> In case it looked like I missed a point: you already have include the
> sub-document into the master to do any validation or processing unless
> you are writing very simplistic documents that do not use any entities
> at all. So no quotation marks (“ and ”), no em- or
> en-dashes, etc. I'm not adding to the ridiculousness of the situation in
> any way -- it's already awkward at that point. That is exactly why
> XInclude is a good idea for document fragments.

Right.  And I'd like to get away from this.  Actually, I would have far
less of an objection to the use of entities for simple substitutions if
we were using XInclude for the document inclusions.  If that were the
case, each XML file could define the entities itself (or, of course,
pull them from a common entities file), and could be processed alone.

--Shaun