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

David O'Brien <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Jul 2020 09:51:07 +1000

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

On 7/22/20 3:45 AM, Peter Flynn wrote:
> 
> On 21/07/2020 08:57, David O'Brien wrote:
>> I have a question about the following:
>>
>> GUIMenuItem identifies a terminal selection from a menu in a
>> graphical user interface. In particular, this is distinct from a menu
>> (GUIMenu) and a submenu (GUISubmenu). The distinction between a
>> GUIMenuItem and a GUISubmenu is simply whether or not the selection
>> is terminal or leads to an additional submenu.*
>>
>> *https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/4.5/guimenuitem.html
>>
>> 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?
> 
> What would concern me more is why the authors are including more than one item. Perhaps they believe
> that GUIMenuItem is for representing all the items available n the menu at a certain level, and they
> may therefore be puzzled as to why there isn't an option to say "here are the items you will see
> displayed — just click the one saying 'Blort'"
> 
> Peter
> 
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We can constrain the DocBook more with hooks (we use pre-commit a lot) but I guess I was mostly
curious about why it was allowed in the first place.

As far as authors go, I think it's a combination of not understanding DocBook and for some UIs it
can be hard to tell where GUIMenu|SubMenu, etc., end and GUILabel begins. In this particular case
they were referring to tabs in the OpenStack web UI, some of which contain "subtabs."

Thanks for the input.

-- 
David

"Unix never says please."
~ Rob Pike

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