Re: [dita-lightweight-dita] Full DITA compatibility

[Don R Day <donrday@contelligencegroup.com>]

Whether the scope of a section could be derived from a heading; whether a section wrapper needs to be reflected in the authoring interface (it would not need to be if the scope of the section were represented by a form field); whether title/body chunks are topics or sections, which perhaps an author need not distinguish anyway... and the overall observation that if we are looking at things from an author's viewpoint, containing divisions are not always apparent anyway. My point is that an authoring DTD can represent the parts that need to be made salient for authors while still being a proper or inferrable subset of a more complete model--a freedom of design that we can take advantage of.

On 5/11/2015 10:21 AM, Noz Urbina wrote:

What specifically would be in the authoring DTD vs Production in this
discussion? I'm not clear.


On Mon, May 11, 2015 4:21 pm, Don R Day wrote:

It may be useful during this discussion to keep in mind the distinction
between an authoring DTD and a production DTD. The authoring DTD
represents the necessary aspects of the information model that a writer
needs to be concerned with; in many ways it describes the ideal
authoring experience (where I will plug Rick Yagodich's useful book
Author Experience) that dovetails into (but doesn't surface) the more
arcane requirements of the underlying information model in the CMS.

Much of this discussion seems to be about the authoring model, and that
is fine as long as we keep that model separate from the underlying
information model (to avoid saying data model, which is more accurate
but not in the typical marketer's vocabulary).

On the other hand, after we've discussed this idealized authoring model,
will the representative deep information model be at all satisfying to
the actual business requirements of the organization, and will all
constituencies buy into it?

This begets a hard question: can we ever get XML into the typical tools
that support Web-based organizations?

To be honest, selling XML is itself like selling fly strips, which are
still useful but out-convenienced by dozens of more visually appealing
_javascript_-based alternatives. The ideal role for XML may lie in
defining the relationship between the authoring model and the actual
systems where users will be storing their data, which is largely in
field-oriented databases rather than file systems. XML defines and
guides the templates; the DITA processing logic itself gets transferred
to libraries that enable existing CMS publishing systems to emulate DITA
behaviors that are described in terms that have value to Web
programmers: reuse of components and the ability to apply
personalization/adaptation to content requests (and perhaps
others--these need to be teased out as DITA's value-add to the Web
production stack used by marketers).

By the way, I totally agree that HTML5 should still consider the role of
an unleveled heading. My preference would be for <label> which could
then be used in fig, section, table, and other places where our HTML
transforms have crudely mapped to an H5 or a bolded paragraph for lack
of better match on the HTML side. The presence of <figcaption>in HTML5
justifies the general concept; they just need to get it into more
contexts where it can be used the same way--to label chunks that are
inline, not hierarchical. Off my soapbox now.
--
Don

On 5/11/2015 5:55 AM, Joe Pairman wrote:

Cheers Noz. Just two quick clarifications before I need to leave the
thread for now:

I think that having users set whether a title is a title for nav or not
is
a simple work-around. Although that doesn't really fit well
semantically
into @chunk (not that @chunks is particularly clear or straight-forward
at
the moment. @chunk=to-self could turn on titles in nav? I'm just
riffing
here).

Where there were a need for authors to manually switch on/off navigation
for specific nodes, something along those lines makes sense. As a
general point, though, it's always been up to implementors how to define
these kinds of navigational / presentational rules, and Lightweight DITA
doesn't attempt to constrain that side of things further (at least if
I've understood the initiative correctly).

(I'd started talking about navigation as an illustration of the intent
of <section>. While you *could* get section titles into navigation, it
seems like going against the grain, and you'd still be prevented from
nesting sections.)

Of course the tradeoff is that you can't then easily reorder the
nested
topics to suit a particular output context...

There's no problem with reordering nested topics provided the parent
topic
content doesn't move...

Right. I just wanted to point out that the tradeoff of keeping child
topics in the same storage object is that you have to edit the CMS
object / file to reorder them. If you're doing it for a specific output
context only (re-ordering for a particular audience segment or product,
perhaps), it means duplicating the object in some way. When each topic
is a separate storage object, you can re-order topics in a specific map
for that output context.
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--

Don R. Day
Founding Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
LinkedIn: donrday   Twitter: @donrday
About.me: Don R. Day   Skype: don.r.day

"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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