Boxes

A box is a container which contains content elements (block elements and inline elements). A box never contains other containers. The boxes make up the lowest level in the hierarchy of containers of a page.

To display some parts of a page differently according to their meaning (such as examples or definitions) in a uniform way, there are several different kinds of boxes. The XML structures of these kinds of boxes differ only slightly. Every box has

• an optional title, which can consist of text and inline elements
• and its content, which is a sequence of block elements.

Course autors should divide the content of a page into different boxes. For each box, the best fitting kind of box should be chosen. This page lists the available kinds of boxes.

Text boxes

Textboxes are the simplest boxes. They directly contain text, which will be displayed as is. These boxes do not have a semantic meaning attached to them. They can be used for short texts between other boxes.

Example

<textbox>
  <p>
    Welcome to the course. We hope you will enjoy it!
  </p>
</textbox>

Semantic boxes

To mark a text passage in the course as information, one can use an infobox instead of a textbox:

Example

<infobox>
  <p>
    The seven SI base units are: Second, Metre, Kilogram, Ampere, Kelvin, Mole, Candela.
  </p>
</infobox>

Here we have left out the title of the box. The following example shows a mathematical theorem which has a title:

Example

<theorembox>
  <title>Pythagoras</title>
  <p>We have <m>a^2 + b^2 = c^2</m>.</p>
</theorembox>

For definitions one can use the definitionbox element:

Example

<definitionbox>
  <title>Group</title>
  <p>
    A <strong>group</strong> is a pair <m>(G,\cdot)</m> consisting
    of a set <m>G</m> together with a binary operation <m>\dot</m>
    on <m>G</m> so that the following properties are satisfied:
    ...
  </p>
</definitionbox>

List of boxes

The following table shows all available types of boxes. The structure of a box element is always the same, as we have already see in the examples above.

Meaning	Box element	Description
Usual text	textbox	Introduction, explanation, intermediate text or other.
Hint	hintbox	Draws the attention of the user to something.
Help	helpbox	Supports the understanding of the user of something.
Remark	remarkbox	Supplementary information to the rest of the course content.
Example	examplebox	Individual case as an explanation of something more general.
Theorem	theorembox	Describes a true statement.
Proof	proofbox	Proof of a statement.
Definition	definitionbox	Introduction of one or more terms.
Experiment	experimentbox	Description of an experiment.
Exercise	exercisebox	Exercise which the user is supported to work through.
Convention	conventionbox	A convention for a part of the course or the whole course.
Formularbox	formularbox	Presents an important formular.
Application	applicationbox	Describes an application of theoretical knowledge.