RE: [dita] Indexterm: ... [ and mentions ]

["Esrig, Bruce (Bruce)" <esrig@lucent.com>]

1a. Would we permit mentions within indexterm?

 

<indexterm>major index group

   <indexterm><mention>term</mention>

   </indexterm></indexterm>

 

1b. Alternatively, a weaker proposal: perhaps we could add an attribute to the mentions so that occurrences could be flagged to be included in the index.

 

The processing of

  <mention add-to-index="y">term</mention>

would be the same as for

  <mention>term</mention><indexterm>term</indexterm>

 

2. Thinking about which alternative is better in principle, alternative 1a seems a more robust design. Alternative 1b violates the "one way to do things rule", and forces a fall-back approach.

 

It follows instead, "offer a path to a context-appropriate result from every context", which requires the complementary rule "support consistent functionality along all paths".

 

The "context-appropriate result" is not the same along all paths. You can't get nested index entries using attributes on a mention, but you can get a mention into the index. That's appropriate for mentions. If you wanted a nested index entry, you could have started with that.

 

Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Hennum [mailto:ehennum@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 1:35 PM
To: Eliot Kimber
Cc: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [dita] Indexterm: page ranges

Hi, Eliot and TC:

Eliot Kimber <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com> wrote on 10/04/2005 08:00:11 AM:

> ... for many authors index terms are precisely a marker indicating the
> occurrence of a specific word or phrase at a specific location.
>
> That is, while sometimes index entries are exactly as Erik states (and
> this is why they would normally generate a page range in the rendered
> index) it is not an exclusive, or necessarly even typical, use of index
> markers.

Point taken. As the thread has noted previously, such occurrences of indexable language would be better handled as mentions delimited with <keyword> or <term> rather than with <indexterm> markers. Instead of requiring the writer to provide the term twice as in the following example

For the proper care and feeding of an element<indexterm>element</indexterm>, you usually supply content.

the processing might make use of the inline term for the index:

For the proper care and feeding of an <term>element</term>, you usually supply content.

A mention would never span multiple pages and thus wouldn't require a range.


Thanks,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com