What if the root element of a database was <topic> instead of <dita>?

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

I don’t (yet) mean for this to be a stage 1 proposal; more of a trial balloon to see how much fire it takes. Call it a Stage 0.

 

The <dita> element is a special case, and special cases are bad. It’s not a topic; it’s a wrapper for topics. Its inclusion in the standard means it must be accounted for, in the rules we define for topic processing and in the interaction between a map and the resources it references. And I’m really hard-pressed to find any benefit to it over and above the use of a simple <topic> wrapper that isn’t compensated for by not having to account for it.

 

• The rules for composite doctype shells would be exactly the same, except that you wouldn’t need to take the extra step of providing a definition for <dita>
• Each topic in such a document would still be individually addressable.
• It would mandate a title for a ditabase document (as opposed to prohibiting it)
• And – this is the big one – it would behave as a normal topic in all processing contexts and not need any special-case rules.

 

Today, in DITA 1.3 (and 1.2, and 1.1), if you have a ditabase document, like this:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE dita PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Composite//EN" "ditabase.dtd">
<dita>
  <topic id="topic">
    <title>Topic</title>
  </topic>
  <concept id="concept">
    <title>Concept</title>
  </concept>
  <task id="task">
    <title>Task</title>
  </task>
  <reference id="reference">
    <title>Reference</title>
  </reference>
</dita>

 

You can open it up in a text editor and rewrite it like this:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Composite//EN" "ditabase.dtd">
<topic id="root">
  <title>This is a DITABase Document</title>
  <topic id="topic">
    <title>Topic</title>
  </topic>
  <concept id="concept">
    <title>Concept</title>
  </concept>
  <task id="task">
    <title>Task</title>
  </task>
  <reference id="reference">
    <title>Reference</title>
  </reference>
</topic>

 

This document is entirely valid, its constituent topics can still be addressed independently, and it has the benefit of behaving exactly like any other topic when referenced without a fragment identifier. It is no longer a special case where processing is concerned.

 

It’s entirely possible that there are use-cases for <dita> with which I’m simply unfamiliar. But in one of the e-mails on the list today related to Robert’s chunking proposal there was an aside about special handling for ditabases and it got me thinking about this. It feels like a good change for DITA 2.0 – simplifies the architecture, simple migration – but again, I may be missing something.

 

Chris