I like this idea. It sort of seems obvious in retrospect, like "why didn't we think of this when doing bookmap", instead of treating book map as if it were a completely unique situation.
I do wonder if this suggests a change within <topicmeta> as well. Currently, <topicmeta> allows <navtitle> and <searchtitle>, which are also what you find inside today's <titlealts>. The specialized metadata element <bookmeta> does not include <navtitle>, but allows <searchtitle>. I'm not sure if that was intentional (no need for extra navigation title at the a book map level), or oversight (<navtitle> was added to <topicmeta> in DITA 1.2, after <bookmeta> was established).
To summarize -
- The current <booktitle> model is bad, and <titlealts> already does something similar, so would be a better basis.
- The <titlealts> element only allows a navigation title and a search title. I can easily buy a generic extension element for other alternate titles; this would have been perfect for bookmap.
- Simply adding <titlealts> at the map level means all maps have this available - but it means at the map level you can now add navtitle + search title in two places
- If we move those out of <topicmeta> then we have to figure out what to do in <topicref> going forward
- Related: I think in LwDITA (?) there was a suggestion of just using <title> inside of <topicref> ... maybe topicref should be updated to allow title, then titlealts, then topicmeta (without the titles)?
- I wonder if these questions are why we went with the current <booktitle> design
And to think, I almost hit "send" after just writing out "I like this idea".
| Regards, Robert D. Anderson |  |
| E-mail: robander@us.ibm.com Digital Services Group |  |
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Chris Nitchie ---03/30/2017 08:53:35 AM---We should allow <titlealts> inside <map> as well as <topic>. We should also add a zero-or-more <titlFrom: Chris Nitchie <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com>
To: "dita@lists.oasis-open.org" <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date: 03/30/2017 08:53 AM
Subject: [dita] DITA 2.0 Proposal: Add <titlealts> to <map>
Sent by: <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
We should allow <titlealts> inside <map> as well as <topic>. We should also add a zero-or-more <titlealt> element that can be specialized for specific purposes, and consider making <navtitle> and <searchtitle> specializations of <titlealt>.
In developing applications that leverage DITA, you very frequently need to ask the question, “what’s this document’s title?” It should be as simple as looking for the <title> element, or its specialization, at the top level of the file. However, this doesn’t work for bookmap, because its title element - <booktitle> - is actually a collection of pseudo-title elements specialized from <ph> - <mainbooktitle> and <booktitlealt>. So you have to write special-case code to handle BookMap, which is irksome. Even then, it won’t work for other <map> types that use a similar trick (like D4P PubMap).
Adding <titlealts> to <map> solves it for new map types, like whatever we’re doing for BookMap 2.0.
Chris