RE: [dita] Proposal for Consideration: Default Behavior for List Items

[Erik Hennum <ehennum@us.ibm.com>]

Hi, Andrzej, Bruce, and Michael:

Not to protract the thread, but Jim Early and Scott Hudson (I think) had the insight based on their mapping work that the DITA block elements are correctly understood as block containers.

That is, the start tag and end tag declare block boundaries, but the element itself can contain multiple blocks, as in:

... <section>
....... First block.
....... <p>
........... Second block.
........... <lq>
........... Third block
........... </lq>
........... Fourth block.
....... </p>
....... Fifth block.
... </section>

From a processing perspective, there's nothing ambiguous about that. The processor can find the block boundaries without issue.

From an authoring perspective, it is attractive to be able to avoid unneeded markup (extra noise) when a list item has a single block.

....... <li>Single block.</li>

but take advantage of additional markup for multiple blocks:

....... <li>First block.
........... <p>Second block</p>
....... </li>

People have been doing without issue in HTML for ages.

So, the big question is whether authors are significantly more likely to abuse the markup as follows:

... <section>
....... A sentence spanning
....... <p>A paragraph.</p>
....... before finishing.
... </section>

Than as follows:

... <section>
....... <p>A sentence spanning</p>
....... <p>A paragraph.</p>
....... <p>before finishing.</p>
... </section>

The markup itself can no more prevent the second case than the first.

Neither usage would occur to me. Are there are a significant number of users who would create the first but not the second example?


Hoping that's useful,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com