RE: [dita] problem with packaging of glossaries

Good day, Bruce.

I think I am a little confused by what is being proposed. The concept of “packages” is not crystal clear to me. Why can packages not share common information types? Surely I could reuse concept and glossentry definitions in multiple packages.

Assuming that we have base abstract information types in DITA 1.3, there will still be a need to have glossentry topics and book maps in all packages. We may want to resituate glossentry as a peer specialization to concept rather than as a specialization of concept itself. I wouldn’t imagine that the glossentry topic would be part of the abstract layer.

Unless I am missing something, I would recommend that we leave the DITA 1.1 topic types where they are until we have had a chance to introduce the abstract layer in DITA 1.3.

I apologize if I have misunderstood or I am taking the thread back to points covered in previous conversations.

Cheers,

Rob Hanna

From: Bruce Nevin (bnevin) [mailto:bnevin@cisco.com]
Sent: August 20, 2009 1:24 PM
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] problem with packaging of glossaries

This came up in the spec authoring meeting today.

The problem: <glossentry> is specialized from <concept>. <task>, <concept>, and <reference> are in the TechDocs package. This forces <glossentry> etc. to be restricted to the TD package. But non-TechDocs folks need glossaries, and support for them should be in the base.

Two solutions:

Accept this. Present it as an unfortunate fait accompli for 1.2 -- if you want a glossary, you have to use the TD package (or specialize your own).
Move <task>, <concept>, and <reference> back into the base, sans TD-specific domain specializations, and include those specializations in the TD package. Present this as an interim step toward simplified topics being developed by the BusDocs SC.

Comment? Action?

/Bruce

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