I have to agree with Bob, here. Yes, by default the stylesheets generate a lot of divs that have no default style. That's a good thing, because it means that their style is entirely at our mercy. :-) Yes it makes the code a bit larger, but I don't believe it makes any significant difference to the processing time on the client. It can be more difficult to read IF you're code is not nicely indented, but using the chunker.output.indent option the resulting HTML is perfectly fine for me.

I too thought the extraneous divs were extraneous at first, until I very quickly ran into a case where they were needed. I had (have) a multi-page output document with one chapter per HTML file, all using one DocBook XSL-specified CSS file. Each chapter therefore has a TOC of its own in addition to the main TOC on the index page. I wanted to style the TOC off to the right side in a float with a different background to make it more distinct and to save space. My first cut doing that was simply:

div.toc { background: Yellow; width: 20%; float: right; }

Of course, that then did the same to the main TOC, which was clearly bad. So I changed the selector to div.chapter div.toc, and all was right with the world.

Were the .chapter div not there, all would not have been right with the world. The same cannot be accomplished with IDs, at least not in a way that would work in both single-page and chunked output. (You'd have to give every chapter TOC its own ID, and then styling them all the same would be a huge pain.)

I guess consider that a use case. :-) I suppose there may be divs in there that are extraneous in 99% of cases, but for most divs if they only problem they cause is that the code doesn't look as "pristine" then I'd rather err on the side of functionality. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

For myself, I am more interested in just an XHTML 1.0 Strict, W3C Accessibility Guideline-friendly version of the output. Remove the body attributes, use some structure other than tables to lay out the header and footer nav bars, etc. Having a dozen sect1 divs in the page that I am not taking advantage of does not make the page not XHTML 1.0 Strict, nor does it violate W3C Accessibility Guidelines (AFAIK).

Bob Stayton wrote:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson