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