Re: [dita-lightweight-dita] Refactoring HDITA with custom tags

[Don Day <donday@donrday.com>]

I added match patterns at http://ditax.ml/hd/ to cover Carlos's additional custom tags. His new example pasted there will now produce a conventional task. There is no difference in transform time because it is just another match pattern, and because his custom tags follow the HTML5 convention, they are interpreted as article and section when displayed as HTML--fall-back for HTML5.

If anything, the well-formed approach is faster than validating and normalizing to get the match targets. This won't matter for direct display of HTML5, and maybe doesn't matter for normal ops--it is no more logic heavy than Jarno's MD to throw-away topics for publishing.

Here's one such template that triggers only on the specialization markup:
 
    <xsl:template match='section[@data-hd-class = "task/context"] | section-context'>
        <context>
            <xsl:apply-templates/>
        </context>
    </xsl:template>

To make the match patterns fallback-enabled, we need to parse the two sides around the '-', using the left as the root match (all 'section-' elements match to one fallback rule) and the right part as the specialized name for extended behaviors, such as 'example' or 'context' in his example. This would replicate the standard 'contains' substring match. I haven't thought about the most efficient "substring of name()" pattern yet, but several solutions seem possible.

As we discussed, the sense of "classing by specialization hierarchy" is lost when the content is parsed as Well Formed, but nothing prohibits injecting the class value mapped to its DITA topic type hierarchy when processing efficiency is less of a concern (in managed content for example).
--
Don

On 5/10/2016 2:47 PM, Michael Priestley wrote:

How much freight does custom tags add to a displayable HTML page? Is there any impact on performance?

Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Enterprise Content Technology Strategist
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/michael-priestley



From:        Carlos Evia <cevia@vt.edu>
To:        dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Date:        05/10/2016 02:46 PM
Subject:        [dita-lightweight-dita] Refactoring HDITA with custom tags
Sent by:        <dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org>

---

Apologies (in advance) but I won't make it to the 05/16 call. Continuing the conversation about refactoring HDITA, I wonder how much mixing of HTML5 custom tags (Don's proposal) and custom data attributes (Michael's original approach) we should keep. I have been experimenting with Don's approach to extend HTML5's native elements to mimic XDITA/DITA tags, and I really think we should explore that as HDITA's evolution path. It makes authoring much easier than having to remember the data attributes.
I compare here both approaches with the proto-example included in the Technical Communication paper I wrote with Michael:

Current HDITA model (based on Michael's 2014 idea)

<article data-hd-class="task">
<h1>How to do something</h1>
  <p>Introduction to this specific task</p>
<section data-hd-class="task/context">
<p>Use only when ready</p>
</section>
<section data-hd-class="task/steps-informal">
<ol>
<li><p>Plan something</p></li>
<li><p>Do something</p></li>
<li><p>Evaluate something</p></li>
</ol>
</section>
<section data-hd-class="topic/example">
<p>Like this</p>
</section>
</article>

My aberrant take on Don's proposed use of custom tags:

<article-task>
<h1>How to do something</h1>
<p>Introduction to this specific task</p>
<section-context>
<p>Use only when ready</p>
</section-context>
<section-steps>
<ol>
<li><p>Plan something</p></li>
<li><p>Do something</p></li>
<li><p>Evaluate something</p></li>
</ol>
</section-steps>
<section-example>
<p>Like this</p>
</section-example>
</article-task>

Is there a third way that combines both approaches? What would we gain? Right now, moving to custom tags will only break a) my former students' projects, and b) Jarno's HDITA plug-in (which was pretty much his experimental contribution to our DITA NA presentation this year).
If this is a good idea, we (I) can work on re-mapping HDITA and new examples.... and then we can move on to the headache of MarkDITA, MDITA or however we want to call the Markdown flavor of Lightweight DITA.

Comments?
---
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Director of Professional and Technical Writing
Associate Professor of Technical Communication
Department of English
Center for Human-Computer Interaction
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201

--

Don R. Day
Founding Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee (current version: DITA 1.3)
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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