dita — archive

Bookmap implementation

From: Deborah Pickett <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:26:00 -0000

I'm not disagreeing that this is an issue, but...

The extra layer has poor fallback behaviour when the bookmap is processed as a regular map (e.g., when being published to HTML Help or something else that isn't bookish). The standard would have to be more explicit about how a topicgroup gets rendered when it is in the ToC (see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/message/3312 for one discussion about this).

(Can you specialize a domain element like topicgroup into a structural element like chapter? I thought that you can't. But topicgroup is pretty basic so it could be faked by just leaving off the href, which is all a topicgroup really is.)

Would it be possible to permit both forms of markup that France quoted? The presence or absence of an href attribute could indicate which was intended. Critically, then DITA 1.1 wouldn't be delayed. On the other hand, there are still mapref issues with the proposed markup, and I promised I wouldn't bring those up until post-1.1.

--
Deborah Pickett
[email protected]

"France Baril" <[email protected]>

2007-02-10 08.59

To	<[email protected]>
cc
Subject	[dita] Bookmap implementation

Hi, I had looked at the bookmap implementation earlier and had found it pretty nice, but lately I started looking at it from an implementation point of view.

Bang, I was slapped in the face. I know it's late in the process, but I thought I should say something anyway.

In order to allow embedding maps in maps and to ease manipulation of a single map. I would suggest that we drop the structure:

Bookmap
preface
chapter
chapter
chapter
appendice
appendice

And get something that is more like:

Bookmap
Preface
Chapters (specialized from topicgroup?)
topicref
topicref
topicref
topicref
Appendices (specialized from topicgroup?)
topicref
topicref

With the current structure, if I want to add a level around the first 10 chapters, I have to change the element name for all 10 topicrefs that were previously identified as chapters. Moreover, it becomes hard to implement maps in maps because you get multiple chapter levels.

France, who just woke up...

P.S. Feel free to slap me in the face again for bringing this up now!!!!

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