More on managing DocBook olinks

Since the end of last week, I have been looking at how to do inter-document links in DocBook. So far

XLink-style links, <link xlink:href="../some/other/doc.xml#anchor">, appear not to be touched by the stylesheets. In the HTML I seem to get <a href="../some/other/doc.xml#anchor">.

I suppose Xlink resolution is too difficult. Granted, such links break for documents not in the workspace. Seems like a standard pattern would be, however, to link mostly to documents in the workspace, then have a few links to other stable documents outside. At which point <link xlink:href="http://docs.example.com/stable-release.html#anchor"> would be good enough for most purposes. (I have olinked across doc sets in the past where the tools team was maintaining software to help writers resolve links. That was a luxury, though.)

Olinks I have failed to get working so far. I have tried the following, for example:

<para>After you install OpenDJ, see
the <citetitle
xlink:role="http://docbook.org/xlink/role/olink"
xlink:href="admin-guide#admin-guide">OpenDJ
Administration Guide</citetitle>
for instructions on using the
features.</para>

Here’s the relevant entry from the target database document (mostly made by hand until someone has time to dig into this RFE):

<dir name="admin-guide">
 <dir name="OpenDJ-Admin-Guide">
  <document targetdoc="admin-guide">
   <div element="book" href="OpenDJ-Admin-Guide.html
    "number="" targetptr="admin-guide">
    <ttl>OpenDJ 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT
     Administration Guide</ttl>
    <xreftext>OpenDJ 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT
     Administration Guide</xreftext>

The resulting link in the HTML:

<em class="citetitle"><a
 href="OpenDJ-Admin-Guide.html"
 class="citetitle">OpenDJ Administration
 Guide</a></em>

If the <dir> stuff is not used, why should I bother to specify it as suggested in The Complete Guide? Maybe I misread something.

Still looking at how to do this.