RE: [dita] History Question: Why does <data> not include <cite>?

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

Is your suggestion that metadata is used for processing and content is used for reading? To put it in more extreme terms, that processing is the only appropriate use of metadata and reading is the only appropriate use of content?

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From: Erik Hennum [mailto:ehennum@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 3:06 PM
To: ekimber
Cc: dita
Subject: Re: [dita] History Question: Why does <data> not include <cite>?

Hi, Eliot:

I'm a little unclear -- is the entire quote the value of the data property?

If so, I'm wondering whether this use case might better to model as a secondary flow (similar to DocBook <sidebar>) that's associated with the topic -- maybe specializing note, section, or subtopic -- especially given your remarks about the limits on the markup precision?

That is, maybe there's a distinction between metadata and secondary flows depending on whether the primary use is processing or reading? To try to impose some clarity on the gray area between data structures and documents.


Other perspectives?


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com


ekimber <ekimber@reallysi.com> wrote on 09/02/2009 10:53:22 AM:

> Re: [dita] History Question: Why does <data> not include <cite>?
>
> One use case I have is for a magazine article that is either an excerpt from
> or related to another publication, what this publisher calls a "disclaimer",
> e.g.:
>
> "World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies‹by Brian Lambert, Tim Ohai, and
> Eric Kerkhoff‹is available from XXXX Press for $299 ($199 for XXXX members)
> and includes the entire competency dictionary and seven tools for use in
> your organization. To learn more, please visit
> www.salestrainingdrivers.org/worldclass. For more information on the
> Competency Model, email blambert@xxxx.org"
>
> This information is relating the the publication <cite>World-Class Selling:
> New Sales Competencies</cite> to the article and also providing additional
> information.
>
> This is metadata for the article as a whole, not metadata for a specific
> component of the article content.
>
> In a print presentation of the article this information is presented after
> the main body of the article (including any nested topics) and is clearly
> not part of the main flow of the article content (that is, it doesn't
> contribute directly to the narrative of the article itself).
>
> In an HTML presentation, this information would either not be presented at
> all or provided in some other out-of-line way.
>
> ...  There is also the issue of simplicity and directness of
> implementation vs. require a high degree of sophistication of data
> structuring just to achieve a simple presentation requirement (e.g.,
> rendering the disclaimer statement after the presentation of the article
> itself).
>
> For example, in the case of this disclaimer, I could break it down into its
> individual pieces and capture each of those as discrete <data> elements and
> then implement processing to reconstitute them into the original narrative
> paragraph. But that level of expense and complexity is entirely unjustified
> by the actual value of the metadata--the individual pieces would almost
> never be useful individually, so it's just adding cost in this case,
> especially when you consider that the content will almost certainly not be
> authored as DITA XML initially.