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

[Mark Giffin <mark@markgiffin.com>]

Hi Michael,

If you are talking about custom tags as in late-model W3C web components, a custom tag can be pretty lightweight, since the browser itself will support this capability (not sure if all major browsers turn them on by default yet). You don't have to load an external library necessarily. It needs a bit of _javascript_ that can be inside the HTML file itself. I'm not sure about performance, I'm sure it depends on what you're doing.

Google's Polymer requires substantial external libraries and Polymer often gets confused with W3C web components because it's related, but I'm not talking about Polymer. I recall some info about Polymer having some performance problems but that was a year ago.

This page gives a simple example of a W3C custom element with some CSS to style it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/Custom_Elements

Please excuse if I completely misunderstood your question!

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://markgiffin.com/

On 5/10/2016 12:47 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