Re: [dita] Groups - Verbatim inclusions of text (character data) (pre-proposal-1.2.xml) uploaded

[Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com]

apg@syntext.com wrote on 19/07/2007 03:00:43 AM:

> Document Description:
> Provide functionality equivalent to xi:include href=""url""
type="text" in DITA,
> for elements specialized from topic/pre. This
is needed by authors who write
> tutorials and alike documents, and need to include
external source code fragments
> (eg examples written in some programming language).

I'm torn about this proposal.

On the one hand, anything that removes
the temptation for authors to copy and paste code from an external source
is a good thing.  I'd use this feature.

On the other hand, I don't know that
it goes far enough.  I can see authors wanting to copy only lines
10-19 of a file, or only the part of the file corresponding to the Foo::Bar
method, or only a fragment of an XML document (serialized as text).  To
encompass all of those we might be better served by a specialization of
<data> that can have such parameters passed to it (and then processing
to grab the fragments, presumably via XSLT 2.0 unparsed-text() calls).

On the gripping hand, could we get away
with having authors write:
  <pre><xi:include href=""example1.cxx""
encoding="utf-8" parse="text"/></pre>
and including a clause in the DITA spec
that XInclude processing is done early in the piece?

These ideas might not be mutually exclusive.

-- 
Deborah Pickett
Information Architect, Moldflow Corporation, Melbourne
Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com