Dear Lightweight DITA subcommittee members,
This is a long message.I have incorporated most of your
comments from DITAweb to the Committee Note, and I have
generated and shared draft 11 of this document.
I have a few items to discuss and, as promised during our
last call, I am sharing them with you with some time before
Monday 05/15. Please take a look at working draft 11 and a)
see if your comments/questions entered on DITAweb have been
addressed, and b) help us answer the following issues:
- Alan H proposed a nice way to define LwDITA as a
representation of DITA XML in Markdown and HTML5, with a
simplified XML version to allow processing and reuse. That's
great and accurate... but that does not explain the new
mechanism for footnotes, and that takes me to the next
point...
- What inspired the new fn behavior? I went back to the
email archives and saw that Jan B originally asked about fn in
XDITA (it was not included in Michael's original post about
XDITA and HDITA). Michael P replied that "The marketing folks
I had talked with about footnote at IBM (and we had some
examples) thought that it would be better not to have the
footnote going forward." Noz U then made a case for including
footnote, and Don D said "Footnotes may not be easily solved
for equivalence across HTML and Markdown and still return to
DITA. The data models (indeed the intent behind the designs)
is (sic) all different."
- And next thing I saw was that Michael sent an email with
options for including fn... and now we are here. The way we
currently have footnote in HDITA (and MDITA extended profile)
is with a custom data attribute as follows: <p
data-hd-class="fn">, and that does not give us a behavior
similar to the proposed fn in XDITA, which should be a block
element with a required id to force the use-by-reference model
included in the DITA 1.3 specification.
- I have merged sections 3.1 and 3.2 with the old 3.7.1 and
3.7.2, respectively. They were redundant about the elements
available in topic and map.
- We need content for the Lightweight DITA tools topic.
- The XDITA map has not been touched in, literally, years.
My example on section 4.4.1 ("Cross-format example") is
actually a good old DITA map, and that made Kris E ask about
keys and keyrefs in XDITA maps. Help?
- Kris also asked about specifying LwDITA global and local
attributes.
- Kris also asked about a plan for a default value of the
type attribute.
I think these questions are good to guide discussion next
Monday, but feel free to use the email list to send your
comments and ideas. We are almost there. The committee note is
looking healthy and needs to be seen by the TC soon.
Carlos
--
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Director of Professional and Technical Writing
Associate Professor of Technical Communication
Department of English
Center for Human-Computer Interaction
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201