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Subject: Nested subsections in specializations
I wanted to focus on what I perceive as a misunderstanding of our intent in Erik's email: > While I'm delighted and encouraged by the positive comments on > constraints, my thought is that contraints offer fine tuning for > a shared understanding of content expressed by the specialization. > The reason for the hesitation about the recursive <section> > element isn't because of structural issues but, instead, because > recursive sections seem to belong to a fundamentally different > model of content (divided narrative). To be totally clear: I am not at all interested in arbitrarily nesting section elements to create long narrative documents. Anyhow, I disagree that there is any correspondance between narrativeness and nesting. Novels tend not to nest much and yet are our canonical form of narrative. Airplane manuals nest a lot and yet are seldom narrative (at least they are not supposed to be). In any case, I am interested in "template-like" specializations where parts of the template are grouped. DITA itself uses this pattern: task title prolog author source publisher taskbody prereq context steps result DITA allows arbitrary nesting of things contained within sections but not at the top level. IMHO, this is itself an arbitrary limitation. Why don't we similarly limit lists within lists? If DITA were built on a foundation that disallowed nesting then the structure would have to be: task title author source publisher prepreq context steps result If you understand why the prolog and taskbody make authoring and processing easier then you understand my customers' goals as well. (in fact, there is arguably a useful generalization of topic where "prolog" and "taskbody" really are kinds of sections) For example, We have a customer who has a more complicated and deeply nested task structure (their prereq currently has subsections). If they have even a single level beyond what DITA foresees then they must start to divide things up into topics: not because they want to write long narratives but rather because they want to take advantage of XML's natural feature that allows them to group things in wrapper elements (which DITA takes advantage of itself). I want people to define their grouping element specializations and their topic segmentation levels _based upon their content analysis_ and not in order to work around arbitrary rules built into DITA. Paul Prescod
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