Dear Lightweight DITA subcommittee members,
This is a long message.I have incorporated most of your comments from DITAweb to the Committee Note, and I have generated and shared draft 11 of this document.
I have a few items to discuss and, as promised during our last call, I am sharing them with you with some time before Monday 05/15. Please take a look at working draft 11 and a) see if your comments/questions entered on DITAweb have been addressed, and b) help us answer the following issues:
- Alan H proposed a nice way to define LwDITA as a representation of DITA XML in Markdown and HTML5, with a simplified XML version to allow processing and reuse. That's great and accurate... but that does not explain the new mechanism for footnotes, and that takes me to the next point...
- What inspired the new fn behavior? I went back to the email archives and saw that Jan B originally asked about fn in XDITA (it was not included in Michael's original post about XDITA and HDITA). Michael P replied that "The marketing folks I had talked with about footnote at IBM (and we had some examples) thought that it would be better not to have the footnote going forward." Noz U then made a case for including footnote, and Don D said "Footnotes may not be easily solved for equivalence across HTML and Markdown and still return to DITA. The data models (indeed the intent behind the designs) is (sic) all different."
- And next thing I saw was that Michael sent an email with options for including fn... and now we are here. The way we currently have footnote in HDITA (and MDITA extended profile) is with a custom data attribute as follows: <p data-hd-class="fn">, and that does not give us a behavior similar to the proposed fn in XDITA, which should be a block element with a required id to force the use-by-reference model included in the DITA 1.3 specification.
- I have merged sections 3.1 and 3.2 with the old 3.7.1 and 3.7.2, respectively. They were redundant about the elements available in topic and map.
- We need content for the Lightweight DITA tools topic.
- The XDITA map has not been touched in, literally, years. My example on section 4.4.1 ("Cross-format example") is actually a good old DITA map, and that made Kris E ask about keys and keyrefs in XDITA maps. Help?
- Kris also asked about specifying LwDITA global and local attributes.
- Kris also asked about a plan for a default value of the type attribute.
I think these questions are good to guide discussion next Monday, but feel free to use the email list to send your comments and ideas. We are almost there. The committee note is looking healthy and needs to be seen by the TC soon.
Carlos
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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