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Subject: Re: [dita-comment] Guided Authoring with Lightweight DITA


Dear Stefan,

Thank you for your interest in HDITA. The Lightweight DITA subcommittee with OASIS will not have its meeting scheduled for February 19th because of Family Day in some regions of Canada (where a good number of our members are located).
The DITA Technical Committee will meet on February 20th and we will address your questions.
I will be in touch after that meeting.

Best,

Carlos Evia, co-chair of the Lightweight DITA subcommittee

-- 
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Director of Professional and Technical Writing
Associate Professor of Technical Communication
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201


On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 8:38 AM, Stefan Gruber <stefan.gruber@isis-papyrus.com> wrote:

Dear OASIS Team,
I work for the documentation team at ISIS Papyrus Europe AG and have the following questions related to HDITA:

Guided Authoring with HDITA:

The possibility to offer guided authoring using DITA sounds very promising, because it avoids that vital elements of a document are left out by mistake.

I just wonder whether I need an HTML editor with DTD validation for HDITA.

For practical reasons I think it would make sense to have an HTML editor that makes use of DTD, because:
  • then it can provide guided authoring (predefined document structures and topic structures, centrally managed)
  • authors will not produce arbitrary HTML that cannot be easily converted to XML input for publishing with DITA Open Toolkit

-> Do you agree that even with HDITA it is required to validate the input in the HTML editor with DTD?

Separation of Content and Formatting in HDITA:

Thanks to semantic markup using XML, content can be separated from the formatting. HTML5, however is no XHTML and only offers a few semantic tags (e.g. <article>). With data attributes, however, specialization is possible (e.g. <article data-hd-class="task">).

As far as I understood, HDITA means to interpret the HTML tags as XML (like in XHTML) and make use of the new semantic tags of HTML5. So at publishing, the formatting info of HTML tags can be ignored and replaced by what e.g. a <li> tag means within an <article> of type "task" (representing a step). So in the final output a step might not be formatted as list item, although it is displayed as such in the HTML editor. Enabling the HTML editor to make use of XSL, however, could allow to display how the step looks in the final publication (e.g. list box to choose e.g. print layout like in MS Word).

-> Am I right with my assumption that in HDITA the HTML is mainly interpreted as semantic markup, thus the formatting included in the HTML tags is for the most part ignored at publishing?

In the DITA Open Toolkit documentation I saw that it offers a preview support for Lightweight DITA. Also DITA maps can specify topic references not only to XML, but also to HTML and Markdown files.

-> As far as I understood, this, however, does not mean that it is possible to use arbitrary HTML as input - right?

-- 
Stefan Gruber, ISIS Papyrus Europe AG/Academy/Documentation Team T: +43-2236-27551-163




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