use of <variablelist> to represent function parameters

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Currently gtkdoc-mkdb outputs <informaltable> definitions for the 
definitions for the function parameter documentation.  I assume it does 
this in order to get a nice layout, rather than for semantic reasons.

One problem with this is that the html output from the XSLT stylesheets 
don't come out very nicely.  The <colspec> elements get ignored with 
xsltproc because there is currently no implementation of the 
adjustColumnWidths() extension function.  This makes documentation look 
pretty bad (both the parameter name and documentation columns expand 
proportionally based on their relative widths).

I would like to change gtk-doc to output parameter lists as 
<variablelist> elements.  It is possible to get both the DSSSL and XSL 
stylesheets  to display a <variablelist> as a table, which gives a very 
similar appearance.  For the XSLT stylesheets, the following works:
   <xsl:param name="variablelist.as.table" select="1"/>

For the DSSSL sheets, the following should work:
   (define %may-format-variablelist-as-table% #t)

For the XML case at least, this provides fairly nice  results.  The XSLT 
stylesheets also allow some additional customisation through the use of 
<?dbhtml?> processing instructions.

In case anyone is interested, I have updated the pygtk docs to use 
variable lists formatted as tables:
   http://www.gnome.org/~james/pygtk-docs/

This also has headers and footers based on Tigert's ideas.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au              | Linux.conf.au   http://linux.conf.au/
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/ | Jan 22-25   Perth, Western Australia.