DITA 2.0 Proposal: Add <titlealts> to <map>

[Chris Nitchie <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com>]

We should allow <titlealts> inside <map> as well as <topic>. We should also add a zero-or-more <titlealt> element that can be specialized for specific purposes, and consider making <navtitle> and <searchtitle> specializations of <titlealt>.

 

In developing applications that leverage DITA, you very frequently need to ask the question, “what’s this document’s title?” It should be as simple as looking for the <title> element, or its specialization, at the top level of the file. However, this doesn’t work for bookmap, because its title element - <booktitle> - is actually a collection of pseudo-title elements specialized from <ph> - <mainbooktitle> and <booktitlealt>. So you have to write special-case code to handle BookMap, which is irksome. Even then, it won’t work for other <map> types that use a similar trick (like D4P PubMap).

 

Adding <titlealts> to <map> solves it for new map types, like whatever we’re doing for BookMap 2.0.

 

Chris