The DocBook XSL's HTML generator always outputs a title attribute for div sections that come from DocBook elements that have titles. So articles, books, sections, etc all have a title attribute.
I don't want this in my HTML. It causes Firefox at least to display a tooltip containing the section's title. That might be useful if I weren't chunking my HTML, but I am, so it is unhelpful. And annoying.
How would I get rid of it? Is there a simple parameter I can set, or do I have to use a customization layer? If the latter, what do I have to catch to prevent it from doing this?
There is no parameter, but you only need to add
<xsl:template name="generate.html.title"/>
to your customization layer. This overrides the original template (in html.xsl) and disables output of the title attributes.