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Subject: Fw: WG: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue
On behalf of Chris Kravogel, who is having TC mail issues lately. ----- Forwarded by Don Day/Austin/IBM on 10/17/2006 08:16 AM ----- "Christian Kravogel" <christian.kravog To el@seicodyne.ch> Don Day/Austin/IBM@IBMUS cc 10/17/2006 08:09 AM Subject WG: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue Don The first posting was a forward from an E-Mail from Mr. Pellizzari from Novartis. (Embedded image moved to file: pic17032.gif) SeicoDyne GmbH Eichenstrasse 16 CH-6015 Reussbühl Switzerland Tel: +41 41 534 66 97 Mob: +41 78 790 66 97 www.seicodyne.com christian.kravogel@seicodyne.com Von: Christian Kravogel [mailto:christian.kravogel@seicodyne.ch] Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. Oktober 2006 17:04 An: 'dita@lists.oasis-open.org' Betreff: RE: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue Hi folks, enclosed I have posted a reply I have received from a customer about the issue Nested Sections. Von: -@novartis.com [mailto:-@novartis.com] Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. Oktober 2006 10:17 An: SeicoDyne DITA Betreff: Re: WG: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue Hi Christian, Thanks for forwarding me this mail. I am glad to see that I have prominent support for my critics concerning the nesting structure of DITA. The problem of artificially shredding information which belongs together into topics to make DITA work is really pressing for us. While I see in e.g. our Clinical Study Reports approx. 10-20 topics (statistics, ethics, pk/pd etc, - all according to ICH standards), the limited nesting in DITA creates about 100 topics. This makes the user interface slow, makes medical writers jump around topics to edit related information and makes the whole enterprise to move towards XML more complex. This is probably the one reason while Novartis may very well abandon DITA after the PoC, creating our own Schema which re-builds DITA's specialization mechanism but abandons the more dogmatic restrictions. Best regards, Josef ps. You may forward this mail to any mailing list you think it fits - we have an interest to find others with similar problems to influence the standardization commitee. Josef Pellizzari Novartis Pharma AG (Embedded image moved to file: pic17950.gif) "SeicoDyne DITA" <dita@seicodyne.ch> To: <-@novartis.com> cc: Subject: WG: [dita] Status 10.10.2006 09:24 of Nested Sections Issue Category: FYI -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: W. Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@innodata-isogen.com] Gesendet: Montag, 9. Oktober 2006 18:28 An: dita@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue 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 CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the exclusive use of the individual or entity named above and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. 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