How do you envision the <title> element rendered in the output? Will it be used solely for navigation or will it replace the topic title as well? If it is solely for navigation, should we create a navtitle element instead?
Rob Hanna, CIP
Senior Information Architect, Innovatia Inc.
STC Associate Fellow
Certified Information Professional - AIIM
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From: [] on behalf of Michael Priestley []
Sent: March 27, 2012 9:38 AM
To: dita
Subject: [dita] Proposal for <title> element in <topicref>
Problem:
<topicref> has a number of ways to express title information, but currently all are bound to specific output expressions:
@navtitle is bound to navigation output; in addition it is an attribute, which makes it hard to process through translation workflows that need to put additional attributes on translatable content elements
navtitle, linktext, searchtitle are elements, but all bound to specific outputs; in addition, they are all stored inside <topicmeta>, making them less accessible to authors, and more parallel to <topic>'s title alternatives,
which are inside the prolog
Proposal:
Add a <title> element as the first, optional child of <topicref> to be parallel to <topic>; allowing easy access to a title element without adding a <topicmeta> container, and allowing a generic title to be stored without associating
it with a particular output deliverable.
Potential second proposal:
It might also be useful to add a repeatable <titlealt> element inside both map's topicmeta and topic's <titlealts> element; this would provide the basis for creating output-specific alternate titles. Unfortunately we couldn't
easily change the existing alternate titles to be specializations of this base element, but it could be the basis for any new specializations. For example someone could specialize to create a <print-title>, <mobile-title>, <audible-title>, etc. - whatever
they find they need.
Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Lead IBM DITA Architect
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
