ReltableHeader proposal 1204 - deeper background

[Erik Hennum <ehennum@us.ibm.com>]

Esteemed TC:

It occurs to me belatedly that the proposal for categorizing links more flexibly than with the information type of the topic might be lacking some deeper background:

http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/24839/IssueReltableHeader12048.html

Really, it's about expanding the ability of authors to have organizing principles for their hypertext instead of ad hoc spaghetti links.

The value of link patterns or categories for structuring a set of articles shows up consistently in the Information Architecture and Hypertext Theory literature. For instance:

http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Patterns.html
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_10/harrison/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050103.html (see the Typed Links and Explicit Structure sections)
http://www8.org/w8-papers/5b-hypertext-media/improving/improving.html
http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-26/27

The last one gives the cognitive and linguistic basis for the value of link patterns.   "Relations might be specified in various directions ... by assigning separate information to the links. In this way, the reader might be spared the frustration of spending time clicking without retrieving desired information."


Hoping that clarifies,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com