Re: [dita] inline elements in dita maps

[Robert D Anderson <robander@us.ibm.com>]

Hi Paul - that is a side effect of the new <data> element. It's really not
very easy to include those elements, but they are now technically a part of
the DTD.

The <data> element allows object as a child. We reuse the object element
from the topic definition. That in turn includes the <desc> element, which
opens the door to paragraphs, lists, etc. So the only way to include these
blocks is to place them in a desc, inside object, inside the data element,
which is (based on the specification) metadata that is ignored unless
specialized and associated with something.

Actually, because the foreign and unknown elements have a content model of
<any>, they also allow the DITA block elements. They too have a model of
"ignore unless specialized for something", so a specialization could easily
remove the DITA based elements. In fact, as Erik Hennum has pointed out to
me, a specialization of these should remove most DITA based elements in
favor of the actual foreign elements. (Erik may wish to follow up on that
thought).

There's a longer description of it here, on a wiki page I set up when first
creating the new 1.1 DTDs. It's under the description of
commonElements.mod:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/New_design_patterns_for_1%2e1

I'm pretty sure it's come up on the list at some point, but I can't find it
in the archive at the moment...

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit
(507) 253-8787, T/L 553-8787

"Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com> wrote on 08/14/2006 04:45:07 PM:

> I just noticed something about the DITA 1.1 content models
> for maps.
>
> In general DITA maps contain very little inline text or
> inline elements since most of the information in the map
> comes from the topicref, topichead, topicgroup, and reltable
> elements and attributes.  But you can enter inline text and
> elements in the topicmeta section.
>
> With DITA 1.0 the content model for this inline information
> was quite limited.  With DITA 1.1 the content model has been
> relaxed so that pretty much whatever would be legal as inline
> information in a DITA topic is now also legal in a DITA map.
>
> Some of the things that are now legal in DITA maps include
> <image>, <p>, <ol>, <ul>, <xref>, and simple tables.
>
> I can live with this, I just want to make sure this is a
> deliberate change and not an unintended consequence of
> some other decision.
>
> Comments?
>
> paul