Re: [dita] The collection-type attribute

Right now the toolkit doesn't provide
any difference in output between unordered and choice - the difference,
semantically, is that "unordered" implies that the children are
not in an ordered relationship, and have no specific relationship to each
other; whereas "choice" implies that each of the children is
an alternative or option out of a set. 

Here's a rough outline of the differences:

(default) or unordered: no semantic
implication. Child topicrefs are collected under the parent for a reason,
but the reason doesn't imply stucture or behavior (ie one or all of the
subtopics may get read).

Example:

>Things I own

   >A car

   >A house

   >A computer

Current result: parent topic links to
children in bulleted list, children link back to parent

choice: child topicrefs are collected
under the parent to indicate that they are alternative paths or implementations
of the parent type, ie only one of the subtopics is likely to get read

Example:

>Getting to the meeting

   >By car

   >By bike

   >By public transit

   >On foot

Current result: parent topic links to
children in bulleted list, children link back to parent

sequence: child topicrefs are collected
under the parent to indicate that they are typically read in sequence

Example:

>Getting there by bike

   >Packing for the trip

   >Leg 1: from A to B

   >Leg 2: from B to C

   >Where to lock up your
bike

Current result: parent topic links to
children in numbered list, children link back to parent, children link
to next and previous siblings

family: child topicrefs are collected
under the parent to indicate that they are typically all read together
- while the reader could start at any place, the topics are all closely
related and typically the reader will need to read all of them to answer
their question

Example:

>Walking versus biking

    >Walking

    >Biking

Current result: parent topic links to
children in bulleted list, children link back to parent, children link
to all siblings

I hope this helps,

Michael Priestley



Christopher Wong <>

07/06/2005 03:04 PM

To

Don Day <>,


cc

Subject

Re: [dita] The collection-type
attribute

Thanks, but these descriptions aren't very complete.
What's the 

difference, for example, between collection-type="unordered"
and 

collection-type="choice"? Right now, we're trying to figure out
how to 

render these things by running samples through the Open Toolkit, but 

that is sort of putting an implementation before the standard. It seems

that we are still missing the original intent or meaning behind each of

these possible values (unordered, choice, sequence, family).

Chris

Don Day wrote:

>It's there, in a link to the %topicref-atts; group of attributes:

>http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/langspec/topicref-atts.html

>

>Granted, this description is terse.  Michael provided more detail
that you

>can apply to implementation behavior in the map attribute descriptions

>here:

>http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/archspec/dita_spec_23_common.html
.

>The DITA Open Toolkit should demonstrate these processing-based behaviors.

>

>  

>