Short descriptions in LwDITA

From
Keith Schengili-Roberts <>
Date
2017-02-07T19:35:00+00:00
ID
Thread
Short descriptions in LwDITA
Here's a crazy thought: has anyone thought about approaching the people who manage CommonMark Markdown about the possibility of *them* adding shortdesc to their spec?
I'd be happy to make the case on
https://talk.commonmark.org/  to see what they say...
Cheers!

-
Keith Schengili-Roberts
Market Researcher and DITA Evangelist

IXIASOFT
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From:   <> on behalf of Scott Hudson <>
Sent:  Tuesday, February 7, 2017 2:07:16 PM
To:  Storbeck, Joe; Carlos Evia; 
Subject:  Re: [dita-lightweight-dita] Short descriptions in LwDITA

I would also support the retention of shortdesc, especially with its use in supporting SEO and display in search results. It is semantically distinct, and IMO should not be oversimplified to using the first paragraph.
Thanks and best regards,

--Scott

Scott Hudson
Content Strategist
Digital Aviation Learning & Development
Voting member:
OASIS DocBook TC, Publishers SC
OASIS DITA TC, Tech Comm SC, LW DITA SC, Learning Content SC
OASIS Augmented Reality in Information Products (ARIP)

TC
Jeppesen

   Digital Aviation

  Boeing
55 Inverness Drive East
Englewood,  CO 80112
www.jeppesen.com
From:  < 
> on behalf of "Storbeck, Joe" < 
>
Date:  Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at 12:00 PM
To:  Carlos Evia <  >, "  " < 
>
Subject:  RE: [dita-lightweight-dita] Short descriptions in LwDITA
As a co-author of a White Paper on the importance of short descriptions ( https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/57803/DITA-Adoption_2016_Writing-Effective-Short-Descriptions.pdf ),  I strongly vote to keep the short description tag and NOT to default to the first paragraph.

Regards,

Joe

Joseph Storbeck
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From:
  [ mailto: ]  On Behalf Of  Carlos Evia
Sent:  Tuesday, February 07, 2017 12:46 PM
To:

Subject:  [dita-lightweight-dita] Short descriptions in LwDITA

Dear Lightweight DITA subcommittee members,

We didn't have time in yesterday's call to talk about an issue that has been buried in the agenda for a few weeks.
As I work on the committee note and detail (used as a verb here) the list of DITA elements in LwDITA and their equivalents in XDITA, HDITA, and MDITA, I go back to the question about shortdesc and how to represent it across our authoring  formats.
In the initial MDITA draft I proposed to Michael back in... ooops... 2014??... shortdesc did not exist, and the first paragraph in a Markdown file was by default treated as a short description.
Then, Jarno asked "What if the topic only consists of one long paragraph?" and we decided to keep things simple and use "raw" HTML/HDITA in MDITA for elements that do not exist in Markdown but would be ok with CommonMark.
As a result, now a short descriptions is <p data-hd-class="shortdesc"> both in HDITA and MDITA.
Question:
- Should we go back to just treating the first paragraph in MDITA as a short description?
- If we do that, do we really need <p data-hd-class="shortdesc"> in HDITA (HTML5?)
- And do we even need that in XDITA as <shortdesc> if we are just defaulting to first paragraphs?


Best,

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