Docbook formatting email addresses

Question

I am trying to get some documentation up and running; however, my email address is not coming up as linkable:

<email><ulink url="mailto:SomeUser@someDomain.com"/></email>

Becomes:

<mailto:SomeUser@someDomain.com>

I don't want the mailto: to appear. If I put content in the ulink, it shows the mailto and the content whereas I would just want the content to appear.

Walter

Answer 1

Like Tync said, Docbook itself does not specify formatting. When you write the <email> tag, that merely indicates to the renderer that the enclosed text is an email address. The renderer may then decide that it should be formatted as monospace text, or maybe that your email should be bold and italics!

Likewise, there's a lot of tags that are pretty meaningless as far as formatting goes -- the city tag, for instance. But, that is metadata to the document that might be important to some Docbook parser out there.

The only way to guarantee that your email is a hyperlink to sending you an email is to use the ulink tag as you have shown above, because a renderer must create a hyperlink if the output format supports it.

Answer 2

Docbook is subspace of XML and does not specify any formatting: these rules are described in XSL or DSSSL scripts that convert the mark-up into a formatted text. I believe you should check these rules out!

Answer 3

The right way to specify email addresses is with the email tag: <email>user@example.org</email>.

The DocBook XSL stylesheets, and I'd expect most other systems, render that as a mailto: link when generating HTML.