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Subject: What Is A Topic
I'm really struggling with the issue of what is and isn't a topic (or rather, what should and shouldn't be a topic). This is partly a side effect of trying to answer the question of whether or not section w/in topic body should nest and partly a side effect of trying to decide how best to map a client's legacy documents to topics. In particular, I'm struck by the apparent conflict between these two statements from the architectural specification: From What are Topics?: "A topic is a unit of information with a title and content, short enough to be specific to a single subject or answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and be authored as a unit." And from "Transitional Text Workarounds": "A DITA topic can be as minimal as just a title,...." Which is certainly true by the current DTDs. But this strikes me as odd, namely a topic that consists of only a title cannot possibly satisfy the requirement that it "make sense on its own". Likewise, the initial definition of topic says "title *and* content" (my emphasis) which certainly seems to require that topics have content. Certainly within a map it makes sense to be able to have a topichead that is just a hierarchical level with a title but no direct content--this happens all the time in docs [whether or not it's good editorial practice is a separate question] but it seems to me to be diluting meaning of "topic" to allow or condone topics that consist of only titles. But clearly there is a body of either thought or practice, at least within IBM, that considers a topic that is just a title to be OK. To my mind, it seems that DITA is best served by taking a fairly strict view of what is and is not a topic and I focus in particular on the "make sense on its own" aspect of topics, as given in the initial definition of "topic". By the same token, it seems to me that if you are willing to allow topics to be as small as possible (i.e., <topic><title/></topic> that you would be willing to allow topics to be arbitrarily large as well, as long as they satisfy the constraint of "specific to a single subject". But in absence of a clear definition of what is and is not a topic, I don't see that we have any basis for objective judging of what is or is not a topic. At a minimum, I think the specification needs to be internally consistent on what the explicit and implied rules for topics are. At the moment, the specifications and statements such as the second one are inconsistent with the initial (and primary) definition of "topic". Either we have to disallow title-only topics (which I don't think we can do at this point since we have to be backward compatible with 1.0) or we have to relax the initial definition to make it clear that topics are not required to have bodies nor are they required to make sense on their own, but can in fact be just titles. 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
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