RE: [dita] Keywords in DITA

["Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@blastradius.com>]

Thank you. Your description clarifies things. This is what I would have thought except were it not for the example in the specification under "keywords".

 

The following example is metadata from an installation task:

<prolog><keywords> <keyword>installing</keyword> <keyword>uninstalling</keyword> <keyword>prerequisites</keyword> <keyword>helps</keyword> <keyword>wizards</keyword> </keywords> </prolog>

I would have understood if the example was:

<prolog><keywords> <keyword>class</keyword> <keyword>if</keyword> <keyword>else</keyword> <keyword>elseif</keyword> <keyword>assert</keyword> </keywords> </prolog>

Those are keywords in the sense that you define it in your email.

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From: Michael Priestley [mailto:mpriestl@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Mon 3/7/2005 7:32 PM
To: Paul Prescod
Cc: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [dita] Keywords in DITA

Hi Paul, welcome to the list.

The reason we support keyword in both locations (as well as a bunch of specializations of keywords) is to allow the same range of semantic specificity in both places. For example, <apiname> is a type (specialization) of keyword. If we have an occurrence of an <apiname> in content, we may also want to index it specifically for search, if the occurrence is significant. So we add it to the keyword list for the topic. But just because it is a keyword for the topic doesn't mean it stops being an <apiname>. In both contexts, being able to distinguish <apiname>blue</apiname> from <wintitlel>blue</wintitle> is worthwhile. So we support the same keyword element in both places.

In other words, <apiname> as content and <apiname> as keyword for search are both still <apiname>s, so it doesn't make sense to have a different set of elements just because they are processed differently: their containment context (body or prolog)  is enough, and allows us to infer processing behavior without undermining the common semantics.

Michael Priestley
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com