[publican-list] Inline tags within verbatim environment

[Lana Brindley]

On 11/24/2011 11:56 AM, David O'Brien wrote:
> On 11/23/2011 04:00 PM, Jeff Fearn wrote:
>> On 11/15/2011 05:38 PM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I don't have the habit to discuss decisions of maintainers but in this
>>> particular case I would like the feedback of the wider community
>>> on this specific bug report that got closed as NOTABUG despite
>>> feedback from the upstream community proving that publican
>>> was doing the weird thing here.
>>>
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=752851
>>>
>>> The upstream docbook-xsl stylesheets do preserve whitespaces and
>>> linebreaks in inlines elements within verbatim environment.
>>>
>>> Do any of you have any document where you need the current Publican
>>> behaviour of converting any sequence of whitespace/newlines to a single
>>> space in inline tags within verbatim environments?
>>>
>>> To me this behaviour just ensures that I'll never be able to use
>>> any inline element within a verbatim tag because I'll lose
>>> the formatting of my<screens>   <programlisting>   and so on.
>>> It's really counter-productive IMO and I can't really see who
>>> would like to lose his formatting...
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>
>> For me this raises a larger issue, should Publican be interfering with
>> the source XML at all?
>>
>> XmlClean exists for two historical reasons, neither of which still
>> exist. Migrating old html/sgml content to XML, enforcing certain
>> standards are met.
>>
>> The old content was migrated years ago and that process required a bunch
>> of scripts that never made it in to Publican ... they were horrific
>> people, horrific!
>>
>> We backed away from enforcing standards sometime ago, see the death of
>> STRICT mode.
>>
>> Given that neither of the reasons the code exists are of any relevance
>> any more, maybe we should just remove XmlClean completely. This would
>> see the death of clead_ids as well, but that was specifically for
>> migrating content and has never been supported for general use.
>>
>> Comments?
>>
>> Cheers, Jeff.
>>
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>> Wiki: https://fedorahosted.org/publican
>
> I would mourn the loss of clean_ids.
>
> Perhaps it was created for a particular purpose that may no longer (or
> rarely) exist, but clean_ids has proven to be very useful for other
> purposes. I know I'm not the only one who uses it; I also know several
> people who are against using it. Those sorts of debates will always
> exist, and are probably healthy.
>
> Is it not possible to remove only those aspects of xmlClean that are not
> used, and retain clean_ids? If I were a coder I would happily get
> involved in this exercise, but I'm an end user who sees the potential
> loss of a very useful tool.

+1

Used deliberately and with caution, clean_ids is a great tool.

L

-- 
Lana Brindley
Senior Content Author
Engineering Content Services
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No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's 
draft.
H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)