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

["Michael Priestley" <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>]

I was just applying the same constraints
as in XML - you can have multiple paragraphs, just no text outside the
para.

Is there a reason we'd want to allow
mixed text/para models in HDITA, even though we've eliminated them from
XDITA?

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:      
 Don Day <donday@donrday.com>
Cc:      
 dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Date:      
 05/11/2016 11:50 AM
Subject:    
   Re: [dita-lightweight-dita]
Refactoring HDITA with custom tags
Sent by:    
   <dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org>

---

That paragraph in list items came from Michael’s original
HDITA draft.

Carlos
-- 
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




On May 11, 2016, at 11:29 AM, Don Day <donday@donrday.com>
wrote:

So on to content models in the live converter...

Carlos' examples tend to follow the convention of including a p wrapper inside list items and definition components. I added a look-ahead in these contexts to add a p wrapper if the first node was not a p node, and this now works equally either way for samples like this:
<article>
   <h1>The point of it all</h1>
   <p>I can sum it up here</p>
   <p>I can say some more stuff</p>
   <section>
       <h2>Stuff</h2>
       <p>And so on</p>
       <ul> <li>This</li> <li>Is></li> <li>A List</li> </ul>
   </section>
<section-example>
   <h2>And more stuff</h2>
   <p>With its own explanation</p>
   <dl>
   <dt>No para in HTML</dt> <dd>No para in HTML</dd>
   <dt><p>With para</p></dt> <dd><p>with para</p></dd>
   </dl>
</section-example>
</article>

(try this in the paste box to see the lw topic result)

But this brings up a question: can list items and definition descriptions only have one paragraph? That is what this tool will do (or wrap the mixed content example in a possibly redundant paragraph). I think it is a blessing to remove syntactic complexity from student authors, so I hope the HDITA minimal case can relax the required paragraph burden, but tools then need to have the right remediations for going into XDITA.

I realize that Markdown has no such ambiguity because you cannot start a list item with a required paragraph anyway. In the Markdown case, then, do you get only the one inner paragraph implied by the XDITA requirement?
__
Don

On 5/11/2016 8:16 AM, Carlos Evia wrote:
Oh I had some Polymer nightmares last year, but I think most browsers play with custom tags now. Safari still doesn’t… but that probably will change soon.
I like that Don’s  http://ditax.ml/hd/experiment allows an author to enter an <article> without any fancy custom tags and the result is a generic DITA topic. Jarno’s Markdown plugin does something similar: an author can create a Markdown file without fancy classes or extensions, and the result is a generic DITA topic.
Of course, then authors can specialize to concept, task, reference as needed… but this gives people a Lightweight DITA base architecture (think of the “Why three editions?” white paper that came with DITA 1.3). You can be a casual contributor and create a simple topic in Markdown or HTML5 and then someone else will mix it with XDITA or DITA. That’s an excellent way to make Lightweight DITA accesible (and easy) before getting into complicated markup/markdown like what we saw in the Bluemix examples.

Carlos
--
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




On May 10, 2016, at 11:50 PM, Mark Giffin <mark@markgiffin.com> wrote:

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











-- 
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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