DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Name

procedure — A list of operations to be performed in a well-defined sequence

Synopsis

procedure ::= ((((title? & titleabbrev?), info? ^{db.titleforbidden.info}) | info ^{db.titleonly.info}), (annotation | bridgehead | remark | revhistory | Indexing inlines | Admonition elements | Formal elements | Graphic elements | Informal elements | List elements | Paragraph elements | Publishing elements | Synopsis elements | Technical elements | Verbatim elements)*, step+)

Attribute synopsis

Common attributes and common linking attributes.

Description

A procedure encapsulates a task composed of steps (and possibly, substeps). Procedures are usually performed sequentially, unless individual steps direct the reader explicitly.

Often it is important to ensure that certain conditions exist before a procedure is performed, and that the outcome of the procedure matches the expected results. DocBook does not provide explicit semantic markup for these pre- and post-conditions. Instead, they must be described as steps (check the preconditions in the first step and the results in the last step), or described outside the body of the procedure.

The task element, added to DocBook in V4.3, provides some of this infrastructure.

Processing expectations

Formatted as a displayed block.

See Also

step, stepalternatives, substeps, task

Examples

<article xmlns='http://docbook.org/ns/docbook'> <title>Example procedure</title> <procedure><title>An Example Procedure</title> <step> <para> A Step </para> </step> <step> <para> Another ...