Trailing White Space:
[[:space:]]*</
Preceeding White Space:
<my>[[:space:]]*

March 31, 2005
March 29, 2005
In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson

Great book and a quick read. Talks about the operating system business of the past and the future. Still very relevant.
March 24, 2005
Setup XML for Arbortext Epic Editing and Direct Web Browser Display using CSS
There are times when working with XML documents that it would be nice
to be able to style the document directly. To do this with CSS here is
a recipe that works with Internet Explorer, Firefox and the Arbortext
Epic Editor.
- Add a css stylesheet reference in your XML document.
<?xml-stylesheet href="docbook.css" type="text/css"?>
- Modify you XML document to hide the doctype declaration in a
comment. This stops IE from looking for it but still allows Epic to
find it. If you are only interested in making it work with Firefox you
can skip this step.<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="docbook.css" type="text/css"?>
<!-- Fragment document type declaration subset:
Arbortext, Inc., 1988-2004, v.4002
<!DOCTYPE set PUBLIC "-//Arbortext//DTD DocBook XML V4.0//EN"
"axdocbook.dtd">
--> - Set writenonasciichar=char in Epic and save the XML
document. This writes all of the character entities that may be present
out as characters so the web browsers don't complain about not being
able to find the reference. This needs to either be set every time you
edit the instance in Epic or via an ACL package. - Create your CSS. A small sample docbook.css:
book {
}
book>title {
display:block;
font-size:3em;
color:inherit;
background:inherit;
font-weight:bold;
}
legalnotice{
font-weight:bold;
}
title {
display:block;
font-size:1.3em;
color:inherit;
background:inherit;
font-weight:bold;
}
para {
display:block;
padding: 20px;
}
CA
Comments Off on Setup XML for Arbortext Epic Editing and Direct Web Browser Display using CSS
Suppress the br element using CSS
I have run into issues with the <br> element especially with
programs that convert things to HTML. A quick way to suppress all of
the breaks is to add the following to your CSS stylesheet:
br { display: none;}
CA
March 23, 2005
Web Developer Tools for Firefox
Another must have extension for Firefox. Adds a menu and a toolbar with
various web developer tools such as converting form POSTs to GETs,
hiding images, outlining block level elements, disabling styles and many more.
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/webdeveloper
CA
Regular Expressions and XSLT
I was working on a stylesheet today that begs for a regular expression.
The Problem:
<file path='connector\fig\82675-48040.svgz'/>
I want to use parts of the path attribute but since the length varies I
can't use the string() function. It appears there is no good way to do
it in XSLT 1.0
The XSLT 2.0 spec is a working draft at this point. It appears that in
2.0 something like this will be available:
<xsl:value-of select='matches([REG EXP])'/>
CA
March 21, 2005
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)

Introduction Article:
Summary:
-
Designed for Technical Documentation
-
Concept of a Topic as the main building block
-
Topic Reuse
- Non-nesting structure of topics I highly agree with. Several advantages I see such as assured relevance when a topic is reused. Also helps with performance in certain situations.
- Object-oriented concept
CA
March 18, 2005
Typography Issues Internationally
For some more information about typography issues internationally, see http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/WD-XSLReq-19980511.html#AEN316 .
While it dates back to 1998 typography changes slowly so it is up to date.