dita — archive

[Paul Grosso]

This is a DITA 1.2 suggestion to improve how one inserts a ditamap reference into a bookmap. The problem is that, to reference a ditamap from a bookmap, one might have a bookmap that looks like this: However, this can be very misleading since the things in the referenced ditamap file may or may not be chapters. Having to use chapter to reference a ditamap from a bookmap is therefore very confusing to users. We could allow topicref in bookmap's everywhere chapter and part are currently allowed. That would permit: However, allowing topicref would open to door to references to other things besides ditamaps. The preferred solution would be to create something like "mapref" as a specialization of topicref with a fixed value for format of "ditamap" and possibly a fixed value for scope of "local". (I'm less sure about scope, but I can't think of a case where it makes sense to have a topicref to a DITA map that isn't available at the time of composition.) That would allow users to enter: which would be a lot less confusing than the current situation.