Re: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue

[Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>]

Hi Eliot,

The agreement Bruce cites was the result
of extensive compromise. Given the number of workarounds available in the
meantime (including simply nesting topics rather than sections), I think
the consensus was that it could wait till 1.2.

If you really think it can't wait, I'd
suggest bringing it up at the next meeting and seeing if you can get a
second on a motion to add the proposal back into 1.1, and if that succeeds,
see whether you can convince a majority of the TC to change the definition
of topic in the way you propose, as opposed to the existing documented
compromise slated for 1.2.

For what it's worth, I honestly believe
that the existing proposal stretched all parties about as far as they were
willing to go. It was a fairly bloody debate.

Michael Priestley
IBM DITA Architect and Classification Schema PDT Lead
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25

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

10/09/2006 03:20 PM

To	"Esrig, Bruce \(Bruce\)" <esrig@lucent.com>
cc	dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject	Re: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue

Esrig, Bruce (Bruce) wrote:
> The agreement on nested sections, as I recall it, was that each topic
> can contain one-user-defined heading (the title of the section). Aside
> from that, a separate intermediate heading level would be defined
both
> above and below section to permit auto-generated headings.
> Specialization of the language and processing would be use to obtain
the
> auto-generated headings.

I obviously wasn't paying attention at the time but I don't find this to
be a particularly attractive solution, for the simple reason that it 
both requires specialization and presumes an unreasonble degree of 
formality and regularity in the data. And it still imposes an arbitrary
limit in how detailed your division hierarchy is, which I find to be 
counter to the very notion of a general standard (but that's largely a
meta-argument about what is and is not appropriate for something like 
DITA to constrain).

If you're saying that 1.1 is closed with respect to issues then I'll 
just wait for 1.2.

But if 1.1 is about making DITA more appropriate for more traditional 
technical publications I would think that addressing this would be as 
compelling as getting indexing correct.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
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