RE: [dita] History Question: Why does <data> not include <cite>?

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

Hi, Bruce:

Not the extreme position but the observation about primary use:

* Content tends to be a flow with nested annotations (division, block, phrase, term, etc) and tends to be formatted for reading.

* A metadata property (like other data) tends to be a data structure over atomic values and tends to enable operations on the content.

I agree that the general tendency is only that -- there are many hybrids and gray areas for content and data such as a flow that has a detailed structure embedding atomic values (witness API Reference) or a metadata value that consists of a brief mixed content (witness <publisher>).

The distinction would be academic without the fallback to general processing. If the disclaimer specializes a footnote on the body, it will get formatted by default. By contrast, if it specializes <data> in the prolog, it will get ignored silently by default (because there's no known processing for a property with no semantics).

Anyway, that's my understanding of the TC's original consensus around the <data> element, which of course may have evolved (toward the fittest).


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com


"Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com> wrote on 09/04/2009 09:51:10 AM:

>
> Is your suggestion that metadata is used for processing and content
> is used for reading? To put it in more extreme terms, that
> processing is the only appropriate use of metadata and reading is
> the only appropriate use of content?
>
> From: Erik Hennum [mailto:ehennum@us.ibm.com]
>
> ... maybe there's a distinction between metadata and secondary
> flows depending on whether the primary use is processing or reading?
> To try to impose some clarity on the gray area between data
> structures and documents.