I think that Erik Hennum had a good idea when he said
that there are two use cases:
Creating content objects that are large and deep.
Providing more flexibility for grouping elements in
specialization (not larger content objects but small objects with more
precisely articulated substructure).
Your
proposal seems designed primarily for the first case. I'm happy to have support
for that case but my immediately concern is more about the second one. I
continue to feel that DITA specializers should decide what is a "topic" based
upon their reuse analysis and not based on the rule that anything that contains
sections must be made a topic just because that's what the framework forces them
to do.
From: Michael Priestley
[mailto:]
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 8:24
AM
To: Paul Prescod
Cc:
Subject: Re: [dita] Two proposals for
nested sections
Paul,
Another alternative is to
create an additional base type at the same level as topic that allows nested
divisions. That way we don't affect the integrity of the topic architecture,
but we give you the ability to design content with nested subheadings within
the overall DITA architecture.
I'm thinking this would be
conceptually something like an article or whitepaper - longer than a topic,
may contain topics, but not in itself a topic. Note that we have been
authoring articles in DITA just using nested topics (there are examples in the
toolkit), and that will continue to be valid as well.
So:
<article id="xyz">
<title>A longer piece of content</title>
<shortdesc>We still have the same general DITA
structure of a title, shortdesc, and body</shortdesc>
<articlebody>
<p>But we have one very important difference:
instead of sections, we have divisions, and we allow them to
nest.</p>
<division>
<title>Divisions</title>
<p>Divisions have
a minimal structure consisting of an optional title followed by block-level
content. They are not addressable directly by maps in the way articles or
topics are, so in that respect they are more like sections, except that they
nest.</p>
<topic id="abc">
<title>Topics</title>
<body>
<p>We also allow topics to be authored
inside the body of the article, or pulled in via conref, so that articles can
still contain and reuse topics. So articles can still consume topics, even
though topics (being smaller) cannot consume articles.</p>
</body>
</topic>
</division>
</articlebody>
<related-links><link
href="somewhereelse.dita"/></related-links>
<article id="nestedarticle">
<title>A
subarticle</title>
<shortdesc>We could even allow articles to nest,
after the body - keeping articles separate from articles in the same way we
keep topics separate from topics, that is by separating their content into
different bodies.</shortdesc>
<articlebody><p>And so
on...</p></articlebody>
</article>
</article>
Michael
Priestley
IBM DITA Architect
SWG Classification Schema PDT
Lead
"Paul Prescod"
<>
11/06/2005 08:51 PM
To
<>
cc
Subject
[dita] Two proposals
for nested sections
Since your concern is preventing arbitrary nesting of
narrative
documents, two solutions present themselves:
1. Limit the
nesting levels to some agreeable level that is "enough
levels" to satisfy
most customers wanting grouping and "not so many
levels" as to support
arbitrary narrative. This is truly a compromise in
the sense that neither
party walks away comfortable that their concerns
are addressed in the
general case. This can be easily achieved in a DTD
with e.g. "subsection"
and "subsubsection" elements.
2. Limit the nesting in the out-of-box
DITA using formally declared
constraints or prose. In addition, provide a
mechanism whereby a
knowledgable specializer can loosen the constraint for
their
specialization (not, typically, to allow indefinite nesting, but
rather
to allow the creation of grouping elements in the specialization).
The
specification can outline the dangers of this loosening and
the
situations under which we believe it is a good thing. If we can
agree
that these specializers are (in general) knowledgable and
trustworthy
then both parties achieve their goal.
Paul
Prescod
