Status of Nested Sections Issue

["W. Eliot Kimber" <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>]

In some work we (Innodata Isogen) is doing, we're finding the lack of 
nestable sections to be a very serious impediment to using DITA 
effectively for marking up legacy documents as-is (that is, without 
re-authoring the content to account for poor writing practice in the 
original).

I reviewed the list to see what the disposition of this issue is. I saw 
several proposals but no disposition.

To mind the obvious and simplest thing to do is to allow sections to 
nest in 1.1.

What do I need to do to formally submit this as a proposal for a vote?

The particular use case in this instance is a semiconductor data sheet, 
where the entire sheet is clearly one topic but no subsection of the 
sheet can be considered a topic in any rhetorical sense because, by 
definition, the information in each subsection only applies to the 
specific component. It would be prima-facie nonsense to make, for 
example, the "Min/Max" section of the data sheet a separate topic 
because that is information that would never be useful either for re-use 
or as a topic included in some other package not associated with the 
overall component. Even more so for any subdivisions within the major 
sections of the data sheet.

And of course the use case for fairly typical technical manuals seems 
obvious to me as well but that certainly wasn't in evidence in the 
message history.

In essence the notion that information that is not rhetorically a topic 
should be marked as a topic just seems so fundamentally wrong to me, as 
a technical writer and as a XML practitioner, that I marvel that anyone 
involved with DITA would even suggest it. As Paul Prescode pointed out, 
to mark things up as topics that are not topics is to erode the whole 
value of topics as a concept.

Cheers,

E.
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9390 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78759
(214) 954-5198

ekimber@innodata-isogen.com
www.innodata-isogen.com