docbook-apps

Hi,
I'm not quite understanding the problem here. It appears that the customization
applied by publican changed the template named 'anchor' in xhtml/html.xsl from
generating an element to just outputting an attribute, with the assumption that
the id attribute would be applied to the element that called the anchor template. As
you discovered that change does not always work because of intervening content.

But I'm not understanding this statement from the Bugzilla report:

"It is never valid to have an anchor tag
with no content in XHTML, so we don't do that."

I don't believe that statement is true. If you examine the XHTML standard DTDs, you
find that the content model of element allows it to be empty. What is the basis
for this statement?

Perhaps the writer did not mean "invalid" in the DTD sense. Are there issues with
some browsers in the way they handle empty tags? Examples of where empty a tags
create problems would be useful.

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net

Hi,

Le mardi 06 avril 2010, Bob Stayton a écrit :
> I don't believe that statement is true. If you examine the XHTML
> standard DTDs, you find that the content model of element allows
> it to be empty. What is the basis for this statement?

It looks like it's not that is invalid but the place where it might be
emitted:
| hmm this change was made several years ago, probably 3 or 4 years ago, way
| before we made publican open source, so it's a bit dim in my memory. On further
| thinking I believe my original response is incorrect.
|
| If I recall correctly, and this was a long time ago, it was actually because
| the anchors are emitted in places where they are invalid. Anchors only have 8
| or so valid parents in XHTML 1.0 Strict mode, assuming you categorize the
| various H tags as counting as one, and the anchors are emitted all over the
| place.
|
| I think I looked in to everywhere it was called, and it was a big job to change
| the incorrect ones. Since it's never used anywhere there isn't another tag to
| link to, it was just easier to put the ID in the real tag instead of injecting
| a tag just to put an ID in.
|
| The way we tested this was to build the Deployment Guide in html-single then
| run that through http://validator.w3.org, it generated massive numbers of
| errors in XHTML 1.0 Strict mode and we went about tidying them up.

He still committed a partial fix:
https://fedorahosted.org/publican/changeset/1140

He puts the id attribute on used for the callout instead of
emitting an independant tag.

If you want to convert the deployment guide to see if you can reproduce the
validation problems, you can grab it here:
git clone http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/docs/deployment-guide.git
(https://fedorahosted.org/deploymentguide/)

Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com

Freexian : des développeurs Debian au service des entreprises
http://www.freexian.com