Oh I had some Polymer nightmares last year, but I think most browsers play with custom tags now. Safari still doesn’t… but that probably will change soon.
I like that Don’s http://ditax.ml/hd/ experiment allows an author to enter an <article> without any fancy custom tags and the result is a generic DITA topic. Jarno’s Markdown plugin does something similar: an author can create a Markdown file without fancy classes or extensions, and the result is a generic DITA topic.
Of course, then authors can specialize to concept, task, reference as needed… but this gives people a Lightweight DITA base architecture (think of the “Why three editions?” white paper that came with DITA 1.3). You can be a casual contributor and create a simple topic in Markdown or HTML5 and then someone else will mix it with XDITA or DITA. That’s an excellent way to make Lightweight DITA accesible (and easy) before getting into complicated markup/markdown like what we saw in the Bluemix examples.
Carlos
--
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Director of Professional and Technical Writing
Associate Professor of Technical Communication
Department of English
Center for Human-Computer Interaction
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201
On May 10, 2016, at 11:50 PM, Mark Giffin <> wrote:
Hi Michael,
If you are talking about custom tags as in late-model W3C web
components, a custom tag can be pretty lightweight, since the
browser itself will support this capability (not sure if all major
browsers turn them on by default yet). You don't have to load an
external library necessarily. It needs a bit of _javascript_ that
can be inside the HTML file itself. I'm not sure about
performance, I'm sure it depends on what you're doing.
Google's Polymer requires substantial external libraries and
Polymer often gets confused with W3C web components because it's
related, but I'm not talking about Polymer. I recall some info
about Polymer having some performance problems but that was a year
ago.
This page gives a simple example of a W3C custom element with some
CSS to style it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/Custom_Elements
Please excuse if I completely misunderstood your question!
Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://markgiffin.com/
On 5/10/2016 12:47 PM, Michael Priestley wrote:
How much freight does
custom tags add to
a displayable HTML page? Is there any impact on performance?
Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Enterprise Content Technology Strategist
http://dita.xml.org/blog/michael-priestley
From:
Carlos Evia
<>
To:
Date:
05/10/2016 02:46 PM
Subject:
[dita-lightweight-dita]
Refactoring HDITA with custom tags
Sent by:
<>
Apologies (in advance) but I won't make it to the
05/16
call. Continuing the conversation about refactoring HDITA, I
wonder how
much mixing of HTML5 custom tags (Don's proposal) and custom
data attributes
(Michael's original approach) we should keep. I have been
experimenting
with Don's approach to extend HTML5's native elements to mimic
XDITA/DITA
tags, and I really think we should explore that as HDITA's
evolution path.
It makes authoring much easier than having to remember the data
attributes.
I compare here both approaches with the
proto-example
included in the Technical Communication paper I wrote with
Michael:
Current HDITA model (based on Michael's 2014 idea)
<article data-hd-class="task">
<h1>How to do something</h1>
<p>Introduction to this specific
task</p>
<section data-hd-class="task/context">
<p>Use only when ready</p>
</section>
<section data-hd-class="task/steps-informal">
<ol>
<li><p>Plan
something</p></li>
<li><p>Do
something</p></li>
<li><p>Evaluate
something</p></li>
</ol>
</section>
<section data-hd-class="topic/example">
<p>Like this</p>
</section>
</article>
My aberrant take on Don's proposed use of custom
tags:
<article-task>
<h1>How to do something</h1>
<p>Introduction to this specific
task</p>
<section-context>
<p>Use only when ready</p>
</section-context>
<section-steps>
<ol>
<li><p>Plan
something</p></li>
<li><p>Do
something</p></li>
<li><p>Evaluate
something</p></li>
</ol>
</section-steps>
<section-example>
<p>Like this</p>
</section-example>
</article-task>
Is there a third way that combines both approaches?
What
would we gain? Right now, moving to custom tags will only break
a) my former
students' projects, and b) Jarno's HDITA plug-in (which was
pretty much
his experimental contribution to our DITA NA presentation this
year).
If this is a good idea, we (I) can work on
re-mapping
HDITA and new examples.... and then we can move on to the
headache of MarkDITA,
MDITA or however we want to call the Markdown flavor of
Lightweight DITA.
Comments?
---
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Director of
Professional and
Technical Writing
Associate Professor of
Technical
Communication
Department of English
Center for
Human-Computer Interaction
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA
24061-0112
(540)200-8201
