AW: [dita] hazard statement widths

["Christian Kravogel" <christian.kravogel@seicodyne.ch>]

We have discssed this issue in the machine industry subcommittee and came up
with the following answer.

We understand the request by Paul Grosso. But adding such a warning into the
specs, mentioning that a author should not specify a hazardsymbol width
wider then the width of the hazardstatement, is an affront to the
intelligence of the author. And if an author would make this unintentional,
a warning in the specs would not have avoided it.

There is no necessity to warn users or avoid that an author specifies a
bigger hazardsymbol width then the available space.

The recommendation of the Machine Industry Subcommittee to face this problem
is:
1. We recommend that in the stylesheets of the DITA Open Toolkit the
rendering of a hazard statement must be aligned to the ANSI standard for
warning lables. This includes to specify a maximum or default value for the
width of Hazardsymbols as well as all other layouting recommendations by
ANSI for hazardstatments. If an author uses attribute values which are not
inline with the ANSI standard, they just will be ignored.
2. For DITA 1.3 we are going to discuss what attributes will be required and
which are not required in note and hazardstatement. We e.g. need additional
attributes defining the different panel arrangements according to ANSI.

Best regards

Chris


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Grosso, Paul [mailto:pgrosso@ptc.com] 
Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. Februar 2009 19:37
An: dita
Betreff: RE: [dita] hazard statement widths

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christian Kravogel [mailto:christian.kravogel@seicodyne.ch]
> Sent: Tuesday, 2009 February 10 12:25
> To: 'dita'
> Subject: AW: [dita] hazard statement widths
> 
> You are right, but do we really try to avoid any possible stupidity 
> done by authors?

Not necessarily, but the spec should probably say what should happen in such
cases.  Even if all it says is "this is an error; an implementation may (but
need not) give an error message, and may (but need not) recover from this
error condition by doing xxxxx".

> 
> If someone defines a table width of 2 inches and adds an image into a 
> table cell giving the width of 3 inches? Isn't it the same problem?

Not really.  Putting something too large to fit in the allotted space is a
classic composition issue and isn't quite the same as having a DTD that
allows for two conflicting attributes.  But that's probably beside the
point.

> 
> But on one point you are absolutely right, we should review the note 
> and hazardstatement attributes for DITA Version 1.3. There are a 
> couple of open issues there, e.g. additional attributes to define the 
> panel arrangement of a note or hazardstatement.

Fine.

> 
> Paul, I will take you input to our subcommittee and we will discuss 
> what additional attributes are required and which should be removed. 
> For DITA 1.2 we have just copied the attributes from note. But there 
> might be better ideas.

For DITA 1.2, we don't have to change the DTD (I leave that up to the
subcommittee), but we do have to say something in the spec.  See my first
paragraph above.

paul

> 
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Grosso, Paul [mailto:pgrosso@ptc.com]
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. Februar 2009 16:02
> An: dita
> Betreff: [dita] hazard statement widths
> 
> In a hazard statement, you can set the width of the hazard statement 
> using the attribute width. There is also an align attribute, so if the 
> set width is smaller than the available width, we could align the 
> output to center, right, or left. So far so good. But then there is 
> also a width attribute on the hazardsymbol tag which is a child of the 
> hazard statement.
> 
> There is nothing to prevent users from doing things like setting the 
> hazard statement width to 2 inches and the hazard symbol width to 3 
> inches.
> 
> It seems either we need to remove one of the width attributes from the 
> DTD or the spec needs to define what the correct processing should be 
> in such cases.
> 
> paul
> 

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