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Subject: RE: [dita] Nested Sections


One place where the sides differ on this is in the criterion "a topic should be able to stand alone". To clarify what is meant by "stand alone", it's important to also specify the context in which a topic is expected to stand alone.

By topic, do we mean something that is responsible for its own links to other topics that it depends on? Or can a topic be something very primitive and section-like that is highly dependent upon the environment in which it is presented in order to define its context?

We have found cases (in on-line training) where a section-like chunk needs to stand alone and rely on the presentation environment for its context. If sections can't nest, then a way to map these into DITA would be to use the topic structure for these and simply not use the extra features of topic. But what we do now is mark them with a section-like element and then extract them for training.

Some of our section-like chunks do have nested titled chunks within them. That by itself doesn't make them into topics in the strongest "stand alone" sense. Forcing authors to use stand-alone topics to encode these chunks would increase the number of chunks that qualify cosmetically as topics, and leave us with a further issue of identifying which ones are truly intended to stand alone in less navigation-rich environments.

To avoid mentioning books, let me ask instead about an online support environment in which certain titles are worthy of being in the catalog (whether the catalog is literal or simply a designation of which titles are worthy results of a search). If we (in specifying the DITA language) inflate our population of topics by not supporting nesting, we (in using the DITA language) will want to distinguish cataloguable topics from the rest.

Best wishes,

Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Day [mailto:dond@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 11:16 AM
To: Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre
Cc: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [dita] Nested Sections


Debbie, could you give any scenarios based on experience that you've had
with customer data?  It might be interesting to evaluate those cases.

And given that DITA is implicitly a topic-oriented architecture, what
exactly does "non-topic level" mean?  Perhaps the issue is more about how
to migrate non-topic content into DITA?  I could see this for incoming Word
or Framemaker content, for example.

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
Email: dond@us.ibm.com
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-838-8550
T/L: 678-8550

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
   --T.S. Eliot


                                                                           
             Deborah Aleyne                                                
             Lapeyre                                                       
             <dalapeyre@mulber                                          To 
             rytech.com>               <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>         
                                                                        cc 
             11/03/2005 08:40                                              
             AM                                                    Subject 
                                       Re: [dita] Nested Sections          
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




Sections should nest.

It may be rare, but it will happen, at the non-topic level.

--dal
--
======================================================================
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre               mailto:dalapeyre@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9633
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in XML, XSL, & SGML
======================================================================



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