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Subject: Re: [dita] index terms
Erik Hennum wrote: > For accessing well-defined chunks of information within a minimalist book, > the index becomes, if anything, more important. But how important is the *sophistication* of the index? That is, I would expect an index to list every useful keyword but I wouldn't necessarily expect it to have frills like page ranges or primary entries. Assuming authors use topic-level metadata and appropriate "mention" elements, somewhere between 80 and 100 percent of a back-of-the-book index should be generatable from that data alone, depending on the nature of the content and the type of document (easier for reference, less so for conceptual or procedural). I guess what I'm really try to say is, adding features like ranges or sophisticated ways to bind multi-level entries to containers or manage controlled vocabularies, feel like over-optimization to me, that they don't meet the 80/20 cut. One of the challenges with a system like DITA is that it enables lots of really cool ways to do things structurally that can make the core information very sophisticated. The more of these that are in the design the more temptation there is for the designers to add more of them. I know this because I lived it for a number of years in helping to define the original IBM ID Doc and then HyTime 2. But the painful lesson I learned was that by and large most document creators are simply incapable of using much of what the designers can imagine for the simple reason that the intellectual and labor overhead of using the features isn't (or doesn't appear to be at the moment) balanced by the value provided by its use. This is the lesson of HTML and XML. So maybe I'm just oversensitive to potential overengineering, but I know in my gut that, regardless of all the clever ways that we can provide for creating index entries, the vast majority of authors doing indexing just want to slap index markers into their content and go on. The other part of this is that the modular, deconstructed nature of DITA content makes defining indexes in particular more involved than it is in simpler book-primary structures like DocBook, when you can just define the index and go. This means that there is higher cost of design for us and cost of use for users to get the same indexing features. That's why I urge caution in evaluating these features. Cheers, E. -- W. Eliot Kimber Professional Services Innodata Isogen 9390 Research Blvd, #410 Austin, TX 78759 (512) 372-8841 ekimber@innodata-isogen.com www.innodata-isogen.com
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