Re: [dita] Map structure and possible new attribute for conref pushand anchorref

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

On 1/21/09 2:09 PM, "Su-Laine Yeo" <su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com> wrote:

> From the Jan 20, 2009 minutes:
> 
> 8. New ITEM: "Conref push for static output formats" discussion
> * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200812/msg00006.html
> * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200812/msg00007.html
> Discussion from Su-Laine Yeo and Michael Priestley ensued. Michael
> clarified that there would be a master build map (owned by the
> information architect for the product) that the processor would call.
> How to handle content that should not be displayed anywhere? Su-Laine
> stated that this is a problem for anchorref  also. Possibly need a new
> attribute. Discussion to follow via e-mail.

I see this as a general requirement to be able to say "these topics need to
be processed but do not contribute directly to any output result".

While it's not strictly required, it would be nice to be able to do this for
topics that are only intended to hold content that is the *target* of
conrefs, so that you can have all your topic dependencies made explicit in a
map, rather than depending on topic-to-topic dependencies to define the
bounded object set of topics rooted at a given map.

One approach that would not require new attributes would be to use reltables
with a specific relationship type to include topics that do pushing. This
would remove the need to add additional typing attributes to topicref and
would make it clearer that the referenced topics are not intended to be part
of the main navigational flow.

Cheers,

Eliot

----
Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc.
email:  ekimber@reallysi.com <mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com>
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