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Hi, Stefan.
Thanks for your e-mail to the dita-comment list. The DITA TC had
the opportunity to discuss your e-mail on 20 February 2018, and
the salient points of the discussion are listed below.
- Regarding "Guided authoring with HDITA"
- Yes, an HTML editor with DTD validation for HDITA would be very
desirable. Is it required? No.
- Will the DITA TC ship a DTD for HDITA? Unknown at this
point; we've never discussed it before. We have discussed
concerns about what should happen if non-LwDITA Markdown makes
its way into a document, and our sense was that it would be up
to the processor/vendor/ tool set.
- The main point in providing HDITA and MDITA is to allow
folks to contribute to Lightweight DITA without dedicated
authoring; if breakage is a significant concern, then perhaps
using XDITA is the best choice.
- Regarding "Separation of content and formatting in HDITA"
- I'm not quite sure that I understand your question, but as
far as incorporating arbitrary (non-HDITA) HTML in your
publishing stream, I think the formatting will depend entirely
on the processor used or the Web browser that is displaying
the HTML content. Of course, if you write HDITA, that is a
subset of HTML5 and can be displayed in a browser without a
publishing process
Best,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 622-1501; kriseberlein (skype)
On 2/12/2018 8:38 AM, Stefan Gruber
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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