Dear Lightweight DITA subcommittee members,
I cancelled our call scheduled for May 27th because it is
a holiday here in the US (and there's no childcare!).
I don't want to wait, however, for our next call to
address a concern/question from Patrick Bosek at easyDITA.
Patrick has been in touch with me as he works on an
implementation of LwDITA, and he had some concerns about
the lack of CALS tables in XDITA.
With his permission, I am pasting his comments here and I
hope that we can discuss via email before our next call.
Best,
Carlos
-----
From Patrick Bosek:
Ok, that seems like a pretty significant issue to me.
Without row/col spanning I think LwDITA is going to really
struggle to find an audience.
Here's the thing, you've basically got two audiences for
LwDITA: normal people who don't know DITA and tech writers
that think DITA is too complex.
Normal people who don't know DITA:
... are going to be coming from one of 3 formats, Word,
Google Docs, or some HTML editor. All of these options
support row/col spanning and are going to be expected by
these authors. Further, when they start using LwDITA and
find out they can't create the table they need to create,
they're completely stuck, there's no workaround. This is
actually one of the primary reasons we configured
simpletable off in easyDITA*, when people would add
simpletables we would invariably get a support ticket
claiming easyDITA was broken because they couldn't format
their table. Then when we explained it was because
simpletable didn't support this, we'd get a range of
reactions, but none of them were happy or understanding.
Tech writers that think DITA is too complex:
... will be coming from something like Madcap, Markdown,
FrameMaker, or a wiki or some sort (probably Confluence).
All of these options will also contain this capability,
and I think almost any technical publication past the most
basic will require a non-standard table.
* the other reason we configured simpletable off is
because not a single customer uses it.
I think a potential solution is to simply use HTML tables.
I know there are some issues with backwards compatibility,
but I think simpletables are going to be insufficient for
real use case. And the result of this is that people who
come to try LwDITA will run into this impassible
roadblock, and become extremely frustrated, where at best,
they'll move into regular DITA and advocate that other
people avoid LwDITA.
Thoughts?
--Â
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of
Communication
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201