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Subject: Example of "blog-equivalent prolog metadata"


By the way, I've been using the following full-DITA structure to hold the kind of data that is normally/minimally used to track blog publishing. Some of these fields are obviously useful for general content tracking as well (wiki pages may use much of this other than "feature image", for example).

    <prolog>
        <author type="creator">Michael Priestley</author><!-- Consider whether the "creator" semantic merits a single name/value othermeta slug instead. -->
        <critdates>
            <created  date="2014-07-12"/><!-- Note that golive and expiry are needful as well; I'd get by if these were all in othermeta slugs. -->
        </critdates>
        <metadata>
            <category>documentation</category>
            <othermeta name="featureImage" content="generic.png"/><!-- This is the image commonly associated with blurbs, carousels, banners, etc. wherever the post is referenced. It is not simply an image in the content because it needs to be regularly identified as a feature image (and the name itself may be a key for thumbnails and alternate sizes in the db)..-->
            <othermeta name="status" content="draft"/><!-- The content atttype may use any tokens that a local organization prefers, rather than trying to attach publishing workflows on DITA's topic/@status, (which is not even with the rest of the prolog; I think that is a potential 2.0 reconsideration). -->
        </metadata>
    </prolog>

The HDITA equivalent could be simply a sequence of meta name/value elements, which begs the question of why DITA had structured metadata in the first place. That question belongs to the DITA 2.0 scope of discussion--we are stuck, I think, with using what we have, although we could use othermeta in the same way to simply replicate the author and date fields as part of a simple sequence. It would still need to be nested twice for no apparent reason, but that's invisible to the author if the XDITA editor uses a form for the metadata inputs anyway.

Maps won't need quite the same data; I think that only dates and status may apply since maps are more ephemeral in a direct-display workflow. (Search results, bookmarks, subset print lists, posts by month or campaign, etc. are all throw-away lists with little provenance, for example.)

The main nature of this metadata is direct publishing workflow; this is different from standard DITA where the usual role for metadata is source management (with some publishing slipped in). This may require some thinking and discussion.  One way to think of the difference is to contrast the two-database workflows of techpubs (manage source/build concerns on one, publishing concerns on another outside the firewall) with cases where both source control and publishing are from a single database (like blogs or wikis) and the DITA is consumed directly by the web application, whether that be "render-in-browser" like Chris Depopulous's reader), "transformed on the server" (a la expeDITA model), or "served via API" to an app for data-munging or content republishing with local (non-browser) services.

For now, the main question is what other metadata might need to be considered for other use cases outside the usual techpub model. We'll come across those as we step through the scenarios. Hmm, do we need a callout for specific new metadata considerations in the templates?
--
  • "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
  • Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
  • --T.S. Eliot


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