Dear Lightweight DITA
subcommittee members,
I cancelled our call scheduled for May
27th because it is a holiday here in the
US (and there's no childcare!).
I don't want to wait, however, for our
next call to address a concern/question
from Patrick Bosek at easyDITA. Patrick
has been in touch with me as he works on
an implementation of LwDITA, and he had
some concerns about the lack of CALS
tables in XDITA.
With his permission, I am pasting his
comments here and I hope that we can
discuss via email before our next call.
Best,
Carlos
-----
From Patrick Bosek:
Ok, that seems like a pretty significant
issue to me. Without row/col spanning I
think LwDITA is going to really struggle
to find an audience.
Here's the thing, you've basically got
two audiences for LwDITA: normal people
who don't know DITA and tech writers
that think DITA is too complex.
Normal people who don't know DITA:
... are going to be coming from one of 3
formats, Word, Google Docs, or some HTML
editor. All of these options support
row/col spanning and are going to be
expected by these authors. Further, when
they start using LwDITA and find out
they can't create the table they need to
create, they're completely stuck,
there's no workaround. This is actually
one of the primary reasons we configured
simpletable off in easyDITA*, when
people would add simpletables we would
invariably get a support ticket claiming
easyDITA was broken because they
couldn't format their table. Then when
we explained it was because simpletable
didn't support this, we'd get a range of
reactions, but none of them were happy
or understanding.
Tech writers that think DITA is too
complex:
... will be coming from something like
Madcap, Markdown, FrameMaker, or a wiki
or some sort (probably Confluence). All
of these options will also contain this
capability, and I think almost any
technical publication past the most
basic will require a non-standard table.
* the other reason we configured
simpletable off is because not a single
customer uses it.
I think a potential solution is to
simply use HTML tables. I know there are
some issues with backwards
compatibility, but I think simpletables
are going to be insufficient for real
use case. And the result of this is that
people who come to try LwDITA will run
into this impassible roadblock, and
become extremely frustrated, where at
best, they'll move into regular DITA and
advocate that other people avoid LwDITA.
Thoughts?
--Â
Carlos
Evia, Ph.D.
Associate
Professor of
Communication
Virginia
Tech
Blacksburg,
VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201