"A distinction is sometimes made between continued
discussion of a subject (index, for example, 34-36) and individual references to
the subject on a series of pages (34, 35, 36). " -- 17.9, Chicago Manual of
Style
I'd say that the difference between a page
range indexterm pair and a series of individual indexterms would make that
distinction. Never assume that the page references should be
combined.
I'd ask whether clarifying an ambiguity in the standard is
incompatible. If we strive to cater to every possible interpretation of any
ambiguity in the spec, we'd drive ourselves batty. I'm of the opinion that our
spec really says what the user can do and makes no attempt at a
comprehensive list of what a user cannot do. The latter would need
an inconveniently large truck to hold the resulting document. So if a user
writes DITA and expects processing behavior that the standard does not
expressively support, that user should not expect that nonstandard behavior to
be implemented by everyone. Indeed, expecting an unpromised feature of DITA
would easily lead to interoperability problems even within a DITA
version, let alone across versions.
As I see it, this is probably not that big an issue because
the XML itself will continue to be valid, and the user can continue to use
legacy processing. Such XML cannot interoperate across DITA 1.0 implementations
anyway.
Chris
From: JoAnn Hackos
[mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006
1:47 PM
To: Grosso, Paul;
Subject:
RE: [dita] Are indexterm ranges backwards incompatible?
I would not agree with
the result assumptions. What mechanism exists for the numbers 5, 6, 7, and 8 to
be concatenated into a range 5-8? A continuous discussion ranging over
pages 5-8 does not mean the same as points referenced by the number 5, 6, 7, and
8. The indexer should be solely responsible for determining when a range of
pages is used, not have some automatic decision
made.
JoAnn
JoAnn T. Hackos,
PhD
President
Comtech
Services, Inc.
710 Kipling Street, Suite
400
Denver, CO
80215
303-232-7586
joannhackos
Skype
www.comtech-serv.com
From: Grosso, Paul
[mailto:]
Sent:
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 11:21 AM
To:
Subject: RE: [dita] Are indexterm ranges
backwards incompatible?
I generally agree with Bruce
here.
But I also need to take
issue with:
new ranged indexterms they add
would cause these old point indexterms to be
misinterpreted
With our existing
indexterm markup, you cannot distinguish between use of indexterms and ranges by
looking at the resulting index. An indexterm marks a point, and the page on
which that point falls will be included in the resulting index. An index
range marks a start and end point, and all pages starting with the one on which
the start point falls and ending with the one on which the end point falls will
be included in the resulting index.
Unless one has a
fancier indexing process whereby one can, say, request a bold page number in the
index for the most important reference and italic page numbers for pages on
which there are related figures, etc., there is no distinction among page
numbers in the resulting index.
Looking at the
resulting index, one cannot tell if index-page-range markup was used to create
that index or not. A resulting index entry of:
cheese 2, 5-8,
12
could have been
generated by pointwise indexterm markup throughout the source that just so
happened to end up being points on pages 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and
12.
paul
From: Esrig,
Bruce (Bruce) [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, 2006 August 15
11:53
To: Dana
Spradley
Cc:
Subject: RE: [dita] Are indexterm ranges
backwards incompatible?
On the other hand,
Dana,
This logic could be
applied to outlaw any extension, since every user would have to review every
document to determine whether they had intended to use the
extension.
With DITA 1.1, we
clarify that an indexterm designates a point at which to start reading about
the indexed subject. The DITA 1.1 conceit is that this was true all along. In
DITA 1.0, this aspect of the interpretation was unspecified because there was
no way to specify anything else. But if it even makes sense to take sides on
this, it's possible to argue that the default disambiguation is the DITA 1.1
way. Indexing practice typically presumes that an index entry refers to a
point at which to start reading.
For those who wish to
specify a range of pages possibly not starting at the top of a topic, a
new capability is provided that permits such a specification. The
specification of a range generates a page range in outputs that have page
numbers, such as PDF files. In other outputs, it generates a reference to the
start page only.
Best
wishes,
Bruce
Esrig
From: Dana
Spradley [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 12:41
PM
To:
Subject: [dita] Are indexterm ranges
backwards incompatible?
After this morning's meeting,
I'm starting to think that maybe ranged indexterm should be considered
backwards incompatible with DITA 1.0.
In 1.0, it is ambiguous whether
indexterms point to discussions confined to a single page, or to extended
discussions that begin on a certain page.
Introducing ranged
indexterms removes that ambiguity.
Users who want to make use of
ranged indexterms would need to go back through their entire document set
and replace current point indexterms with ranged indexterms where
appropriate - otherwise any new ranged indexterms they add would cause these
old point indexterms to be misinterpreted.
Doesn't that amount to
backwards
incompatibility?
--Dana
