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Hi Rob,
Thanks for your thoughts. The idea here is to
extend DocBook into the "bottom-up" approach by supporting standalone units of
information that can be assembled into larger units of publication. What
you have not yet seen is the proposal for the assembly process, because the
DocBook TC is still hashing that out. That proposal is forthcoming, and
then the discussion can be a bit more complete. The combination of
assembly and topic will allow those who are currently using section elements as
modules to instead use an element designed as a standalone topic.
You ask "why not just use DITA?". I think
there are going to be lots of answers and discussions about that. Just
because someone wants to set their content up in a modular fashion does not mean
they have to use DITA, if there is a good alternative. This proposal is
for those who want to do modular content but don't need the special features of
DITA, or who prefer to use DocBook markup and stylesheets.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 8:19
AM
Subject: RE: DocBook topic element
There's something about introducing <topic>
into DocBook that doesn't quite seem right to me.
I think that the DITA model is a "bottom-up"
approach, using <topic> as the building block for publications. However,
the DocBook model (so far) has been a "top-down" approach, with documents
typically being authored as entire publications that contain chapters and
sections.
Introducing a <topic> into DocBook muddies the
waters. Either:
(1) You use <topic>s instead of <book>s,
in which case why not just use DITA?; or,
(2) You insert <topic>s into <book>s, in
which case the <topic> wouldn't really seem to be a standalone
unit of information as intended.
That's my two cents', anyway.
*************************
Rob
Cavicchio
Principal Technical
Writer
EMC Captiva
EMC Corporation
10145 Pacific Heights Boulevard,
6th Floor
San Diego, CA 92121-4234
P: (858) 320-1208
F: (858)
320-1010
E: Cavicchio_Rob@emc.com
The opinions expressed here are
my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in
advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of
EMC.
This would be most welcome!
We currently do modular authoring with customized section templates but
without schema validation. Topics might save us from the consistency
maintenance nightmare :)
About the design: you say in #2 that a topic can be for example a task,
does this mean that db.task will be a child of topic? If so, consider that
both topic, task, and procedure elements have a title. Today, with task as
child of section, you get the title three times (by default) - and if you do
not wrap tasks in sections , the tasks are not numbered and you easily get
validation errors when assembling your modular document.
If you implement this, please consider adding the
DITA-like "Related information" block at the end of topics.
Best regards, Bergfrid Skaara
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Bob Stayton <bobs@sagehill.net> wrote:
The
DocBook Technical Committee is considering adding features to DocBook to
better support modular authoring and assembly of documents. The
Committee is developing an assembly structure that lets you point to
DocBook files and elements, similar in function (but not form) to DITA
maps. A process would be run on an assembly to pull the various
elements together for further processing as a document.
While it
would be possible to assemble a document from existing DocBook elements, I
submitted an additional proposal to add a new <topic> element. Such
a topic element would be a natural candidate for assembly of modular units
into larger documents.
A new topic element is needed because no
other DocBook
element meets the needs for authoring standalone units
of
information. A section element is not appropriate,
because
it implies a "section of something" with a larger
context.
The article element comes closest, but it allows
appendix,
acknowledgements, and colophon children, which are
not
appropriate for a topic. Also, article currently cannot
be
a child of chapter or appendix.
The design goals of this proposal
are:
a. To provide a designated element for authoring
modular
content, each instance of which "stands alone", but
which also has
relationships to other modules.
b. Design the topic element to be
very general, so
that it can be adapted for many types of
topics.
c. Make the addition of topic backwards compatible
with
DocBook 5.0.
d. Clearly distinguish topics and
sections.
Here are is the proposed design for topic:
1.
The content model for topic is identical to that of section.
2. A
topic type is indicated by a CDATA "type" attribute value.
For example,
"task", "reference", "concept", etc.
3. A topic cannot include
topic children. Allowing a topic
to contain other topic elements
breaks the semantic of
"standalone unit of information".
4. A
topic can contain section children to subdivide its content
for clarity
and ease of reference.
5. A section element cannot contain a
topic element.
Placing a topic inside a section implies the
topic
depends on the section parent for its context.
It also
hopelessly muddles the distinction between
topic and section.
6.
Allow topic as a child of book or part. This allows you
to author
groups of topics in a convenient container.
Such topics could be
siblings of chapters and other
component elements, the way article can
be such a sibling.
7. Allow topic as a child of chapter or
appendix, but not
as a sibling of section. This also allows you
to author
groups of topics in a convenient container, this
time
grouped into a chapter or appendix. There is an
additional
constraint, though. A chapter can contain either
section
children or topic children, but not both. This is
to
maintain a clear distinction between topics and
sections.
The Committee would like to allow some
experimentation and comment before adopting the new element. I
include here a customization of DocBook 5.0 RelaxNG (compact syntax) to
add a topic element as described above. The Committee looks forward
to users trying it out and commenting on their experiences and
ideas.
------------------ topic customization
-------------------------------
default namespace = "http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
namespace db = "http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
namespace xlink = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
namespace s = "http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron"
namespace a = "http://relaxng.org/ns/compatibility/annotations/1.0"
include
"docbook.rnc" inherit = db {
db.toplevel.sections
=
((db.section+, db.simplesect*) | db.simplesect+)
|
(db.sect1+, db.simplesect*)
| db.refentry+
|
dbx.topic+
}
dbx.topic =
element topic {
dbx.topic.attlist,
dbx.topic.info,
db.recursive.blocks.or.sections,
db.navigation.components*
}
dbx.topic.type.attribute
=
attribute type { text }
dbx.topic.attlist =
db.section.attlist & dbx.topic.type.attribute?
dbx.topic.info =
db._info.title.req
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob
Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net
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