Re: Why does <menuchoice> support multiple <guimenuitem> elements?

Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]> Tue, 21 Jul 2020 15:57:59 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.text.docbook.misc
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

David O'Brien <[email protected]> writes:
> If a GUIMenuItem is terminal, shouldn't there be only one? Our writers
> regularly include >1 inside <menuchoice> but we don't get any
> validation errors. What did I miss?

The line between descriptive markup and modeling is a bit blurry.
DocBook definitely dips its toes into modeling here and there, but it
isn’t especially prescriptive where it doesn’t have to be.

I’m inclined to agree that you shouldn’t put more than one guimenuitem
in a menu choice, but someone somewhere probably has a use case that
says they need to do it.

You can create a local customization that imposes tighter constraints.
If you do that, all of your documents will still be valid DocBook. If
DocBook is too constrained and you need to relax constraints, then your
documents won’t be valid DocBook and that may cause problems (technical
or political) for you. That’s one motivation for not being overly
prescriptive.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]>
https://nwalsh.com/

> As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter
> it, you are its slave.--Solomon Ibn Gabirol

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