If you want to leave the navigational headers and footers in place, and just add something of your own, such as a copyright line, then you can fill in some no-op templates that are already called by the stylesheets. These are the header and footer templates in the order in which they are called on the page, including four that can be user defined:

<xsl:template name="user.footer.content">
  <HR/>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="//copyright[1]" mode="titlepage.mode"/>
</xsl:template>

<releaseinfo>
  $Id: dbxsl.xml,v 1.128 2007/09/02 18:19:18 bobs Exp $
</releaseinfo

<xsl:template name="user.footer.content">
  <P class="CVSinfo">
    <xsl:value-of select="//releaseinfo[1]"/>
  </P>
</xsl:template>

The standard navigational headers and footers in chunked output use words such as Next, Prev, Up, and Home.

You can replace those words with different words by customizing the generated text. See the section “Customizing generated text” for a description of this method of customization. The following is an example that changes the word Home with Table of Contents for English output:

<xsl:param name="local.l10n.xml" select="document('')" />
<l:i18n xmlns:l="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/xmlns/l10n/1.0">
 <l:l10n language="en">
  <l:gentext key="nav-home" text="Table of Contents"/>
 </l:l10n>
</l:i18n>

See the stylesheet file common/en.xml to see all the l:gentext elements with key names that begin with nav- that specify the navigational labels.

You can also replace the navigational words with graphical icons. See the section “Navigational icons” for the parameters to turn that feature on. You can also supply your own graphics.

The standard navigational headers and footers also show the titles of the other files by default. If you want a very clean presentation without the titles, then you can set the navig.showtitles parameter to zero (it is 1 by default). Then you will see only Next and Prev or their icon equivalents.

Bread crumbs are a common navigational aid that displays the sequence of nested elements that generated the currently displayed chunk. Each of the items in the sequence is a link to an ancestor element, which provides a higher context than the current node. So if you chunk at section level 2, then the breadcrumbs for such a section might display the titles for its book, chapter, and section level 1 as links.

The following example shows a custom template that generates the links, and how it can be called.

Template to generate breadcrumbs:
<xsl:template name="breadcrumbs">
  <xsl:param name="this.node" select="."/>
  <div class="breadcrumbs">
    <xsl:for-each select="$this.node/ancestor::*">
      <span class="breadcrumb-link">
        <a>
          <xsl:attribute name="href">
            <xsl:call-template name="href.target">
              <xsl:with-param name="object" select="."/>
              <xsl:with-param name="context" select="$this.node"/>
            </xsl:call-template>
          </xsl:attribute>
          <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="title.markup"/>
        </a>
      </span>
      <xsl:text> &gt; </xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
    <!-- And display the current node, but not as a link -->
    <span class="breadcrumb-node">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="$this.node" mode="title.markup"/>
    </span>
  </div>
</xsl:template>

Call the template:
<xsl:template name="user.header.content">
  <xsl:call-template name="breadcrumbs"/>
</xsl:template>

The breadcrumbs template selects the ancestors using ancestor::*, and then generates a link for each. The select in an xsl:for-each presents the nodes in document order, with the current context node designated as "." within the xsl:for-each. The href is generated using the template named href.target, which will generate an appropriate link between any two chunks. The context param should contain the starting point for the link, whose value was saved before the xsl:for-each changed the context node, and the target chunk is designated by the object param. The template then generates the title using mode="title.markup". A separator string is added after each, which can be customized for your style. Then the title of the current node is added, but not as a link. Each title is contained in a span element with a class attribute so it can be styled using CSS.

You call your new template using the placeholder template named user.header.content, which is automatically called at the top of each chunked output file.

If you decide you need to completely replace the navigational headers and footers, then you can either create replacement templates, or you can turn them off and apply the user-defined templates instead.

If you want to retain the navigational features such as Next and Previous, then it is probably easiest to modify the existing templates. Copy the templates named header.navigation and footer.navigation from the html/chunk-common.xsl file to your customization layer for modification. You'll find they are substantial templates that create small tables to format the header and footer. They are passed two parameters named prev and next, which are the XML nodes for those pointers.

If your goal is to completely replace the standard headers and footers, then set the suppress.navigation parameter to 1 to turn them off. You can then define your own in templates named user.header.navigation and user.footer.navigation. If you do not define any new templates, then you will completely suppress headers and footers.