Formal Markup Caveats (Common Desktop Environment: Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide)

Common Desktop Environment: Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide

Formal Markup Caveats

Shorthand and formal markup share a common set of elements, such as chapter, section, head, list, paragraph, and so forth. However, formal markup differs from shorthand markup in these important ways:

Every element requires a start and an end tag.
Tags for each subcomponent of an element must be entered.
The / (forward slash) is the end tag delimiter in formal markup. End tags use this format, </tagname>.

Entity declarations use the SYSTEM parameter instead of the FILE parameter used in shorthand declarations.

Explicit Start and End Tags

Each element, its component parts, and elements it contains must be explicitly tagged. For example, here is the formal markup for a chapter head. To read this, and other markup examples easily, tags are indented. Indentation is not required in actual markup.

<chaphead>
      <head>
              <partext>Front Panel Help</partext>
       </head>
 </chaphead>

Notice the additional tags, <head> and <partext>; these are subcomponents of the <chaphead> element. Each of these elements requires an explicit start and end tag.