Nested Sections

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

In a previous discussion, Michael asked why nest sections when you can
nest topics. My opinion is as follows.

If topic-based authoring means anythng then it means that you don't
arbitrarily shred everything with a title into a topic. Topics are
things that have meaning ON THEIR OWN. A section that is inherently
embedded in its context should not become a topic to fulfill an
arbitrary requirement of a framework.

Our customer is in the e-learning domain. He has "questions" that are
directly related to the surrounding content. The questions are richly
structured like sections. The set of questions needs a wrapper element
to supply a title and organize the authoring experience. 

Reusable Learning Object
	Information
	Information
	Questions
		Question title
			Para
			Para
			List
			Para
		Question
			Para
			List
			Table
			Para
		Question
			Para
			Table
			Para

So in this case I'm not looking for infinitely nested sections. I just
need two levels hard-coded into the specialized topic type. I don't
think that this design is controversial, innovative or unique.

If I turn "Question" into a topic type then I also need to turn
"Questions" into a topic type and its only purpose is to wrap up other
topics. Plus I cannot default the title. Plus there are content
management and policy implications, because the customer wants all
topics to be content managed objects and all content managed objects to
be topics (in the sense of being inherently designed for reuse). (which
seems quite reasonable to me)

My other use case is wrapping up multiple elements to supply a single
conditional attribute on them.

Para
Section audience="expert"
	Para
	Para
	Section product=""
		Para
		Para
		Para
Para

I would also use this mechanism to conref more than one element at a
time. (I personally prefer this to a range-start/range-end model).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@innodata-isogen.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 12:00 PM
> To: Michael Priestley
> Cc: Paul Prescod; dond@us.ibm.com; ehennum@us.ibm.com; Jerry 
> Silver; joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com
> Subject: Re: [dita] Thoughts On Sections
> 
> Michael Priestley wrote:
> > 
> > What is it about nested sections in particular that makes them more 
> > suitable for your purposes than nested topics?
> 
> The distinction is that the sections do not meet the 
> requirements for topics, namely that they are not suitable 
> for standalone use, that they cannot stand by themselves.
> 
> This is not just a semantic distinction for information 
> content but could have content management implications. For 
> example, a likely content management scenario is that all 
> topics are managed as separate storage objects. Using topics 
> simply to get the effect of nested sections would interfere 
> with this as it would require either additional business 
> rules based on something like an outputclass attribute value 
> or other distinguishing metadata value or some other, 
> non-DITA-defined, way of distinguishing *real* topics (those 
> that are inherently re-usable) from "section" topics (those 
> that are not inherently re-usable and that should not be made 
> available for re-use by default).
> 
> Again, I agree with Paul that in a standard as general as 
> DITA it is simply inappropriate to impose this degree policy 
> constraint--it is imposing an editorial policy that is not 
> universally accepted.
> 
> And I do not agree that nested sections some how destroy the 
> essential nature of DITA. It simply requires, as DITA already 
> does, that you think clearly about what are topics and what 
> are not and what your editorial policies for them are.
> 
> And as there are ample mechanisms for imposing constraints 
> (either through specialization or through the new constraint 
> mechanism) anyone who feels strongly that sections should not 
> nest can impose that constraint.
> 
> In any application standard there is great temptation to 
> impose policy decisions. In standards with very specific uses 
> that can be appropriate, but the more general a standard is 
> the less appropriate it is. This is something we struggled 
> with in HyTime.
> > My personal feeling is that at the lowest level an 
> architecture like DITA should impose almost no constraints, 
> serving primarily to establish the names of things with only 
> those context constraints needed to have a sensible base, 
> with all other constraints being imposed at higher levels of 
> specialization. This helps ensure the widest applicability in 
> the future and avoids unnecessary constraints.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> E.
> 
> 
>