opubWriter

opubWriter uses the tinyMCE editor for the creation and modification of content documents. TinyMCE can output XHTML documents, which is what we need to conform with the Open Publication Specification (OPS). Section 1.4.1.2 of the OPS lists the conditions which a conformant content document must meet. Condition v says:

v. all XHTML elements and attributes not contained in an Inline XML Island are drawn from the XHTML subset identified in this document.

The list of acceptable XHTML elements and attributes can be found in Section 2.2. These make up the OPS Preferred Vocabulary and include all the usual suspects like: h1, h2 , h3, strong, big, small, em, table, img, etc. (hands up – who thinks ‘etc’ is an XHTML element?)

I recognised a while ago that I hadn’t configured opubWriter’s TinyMCE instance to restrict what the author can enter to the OPS Preferred Vocabulary. TinyMCE has a configuration setting called ‘valid_elements’ which is the list of elements and attributes that an instance of the editor will allow. Elements and attributes not in the list are stripped out when TinyMCE outputs its content. This is exactly what I needed and, by comparing the list in the OPS with the default valid_elements set, I was able to derive an OPS-conformant set of valid_elements. So now I’m testing a version of opubWriter with the following configuration setting.

valid_elements : “@[id|class|style|title|dir + "onmousedown|onmouseup|onmouseover|onmousemove|onmouseout|onkeypress|"
+ "onkeydown|onkeyup],a[rel|rev|charset|hreflang|tabindex|accesskey|type|"
+ "name|href|target|title|class|onfocus|onblur],strong/b,em/i,u,”
+ “#p,-ol[type|compact],-ul[type|compact],-li,br,img[longdesc|usemap|"
+ "src|border|alt=|title|hspace|vspace|width|height|align],-sub,-sup,”
+ “-blockquote[cite],-table[border=0|cellspacing|cellpadding|width|frame|rules|"
+ "height|align|summary|bgcolor|background|bordercolor],-tr[rowspan|width|"
+ "height|align|valign|bgcolor|background|bordercolor],tbody,thead,tfoot,”
+ “#td[colspan|rowspan|width|height|align|valign|bgcolor|background|bordercolor"
+ "|scope],#th[colspan|rowspan|width|height|align|valign|scope],caption,-div,”
+ “-span,-code,-pre,address,-h1,-h2,-h3,-h4,-h5,-h6,hr[size|noshade],”
+ “dd,dl,dt,cite,abbr,acronym,del[datetime|cite],ins[datetime|cite],”
+ “object[classid|width|height|codebase|*],param[name|value|_value]“
+ “,script[src|type],map[name],area[shape|coords|href|alt|target],bdo,”
+ “col[align|char|charoff|span|valign|width],colgroup[align|char|charoff|span|"
+ "valign|width],dfn,kbd,noscript,q[cite],samp,small,”
+ “textarea[cols|rows|disabled|name|readonly],tt,var,big”

You can review the syntax of this statement at the link provided above. The following elements and their attributes were removed from the default valid_elements provided by TinyMCE:

strike, u,  font, embed, button, fieldset, form, input, label, legend, optgroup, option, select