Re: DOCBOOK: re step container for procedure

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

Everywhere where I've got "group of steps" below, please substitute
"group of steps and an optional title and titleabbrev".

Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net> writes:

> Michael Smith wrote:
> ...
> | > | Having a Stepset container would make it possible for authoring groups
> | > | to store and reuse *just* a set of steps itself-- without the Title or
> | > | Para material specific to the particular context of the admin guide or
> | > | the context of the training manual.
> | > 
> | > It's already possible to reuse the set of steps - use an entity.
> | 
> | Yep-- an excellent workaround that will always work. But a workaround.
> 
> Not a workaround, but a fundamental facility of SGML.  As this 
> facility is available, no argument that markup is necessary to
> make reuse possible is coherent.

You're right of course-- one way or another, to reuse a group of
steps, they will have to be stored as an entity at some point. What
I'm talking about is a way to facilitate automation of that.

For a group of steps to be reused alone-- without the rest of the
Procedure stuff-- a person needs to manually create an entity
containing the steps, because the group of steps is not delimited in
as a group. It takes a human looking at it to see three steps in a row
and say, that's a group of steps I can store as an entity.

But they are not logically delimited in a way that a machine-- a
document management system or other processing app-- would normally
expect. If we create a Stepset container, a doc management system can
automatically store the Stepset and all its contents as one entity.

   --Mike Smith




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