dita — archive

[Christopher Nitchie]

I don’t (yet) mean for this to be a stage 1 proposal; more of a trial balloon to see how much fire it takes. Call it a Stage 0. The <dita> element is a special case, and special cases are bad. It’s not a topic; it’s a wrapper for topics. Its inclusion in the standard means it must be accounted for, in the rules we define for topic processing and in the interaction between a map and the resources it references. And I’m really hard-pressed to find any benefit to it over and above the use of a simple <topic> wrapper that isn’t compensated for by not having to account for it. The rules for composite doctype shells would be exactly the same, except that you wouldn’t need to take the extra step of providing a definition for <dita> Each topic in such a document would still be individually addressable. It would mandate a title for a ditabase document (as opposed to prohibiting it ) And – this is the big one – it would behave as a normal topic in all processing contexts and not need any special-case rules. Today, in DITA 1.3 (and 1.2, and 1.1), if you have a ditabase document, like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE dita PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Composite//EN" "ditabase.dtd"> <dita> <topic id = "topic" > <title> Topic </title> </topic> <concept id = "concept" > <title> Concept </title> </concept> <task id = "task" > <title> Task </title> </task> <reference id = "reference" > <title> Reference </title> </reference> </dita> You can open it up in a text editor and rewrite it like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Composite//EN" "ditabase.dtd"> < topic id = "root" > <title> This is a DITABase Document </title> <topic id = "topic" > <title> Topic </title> </topic> <concept id = "concept" > <title> Concept </title> </concept> <task id = "task" > <title> Task </title> </task> <reference id = "reference" > <title> Reference </title> </reference> </ topic > This document is entirely valid, its constituent topics can still be addressed independently, and it has the benefit of behaving exactly like any other topic when referenced without a fragment identifier. It is no longer a special case where processing is concerned. It’s entirely possible that there are use-cases for <dita> with which I’m simply unfamiliar. But in one of the e-mails on the list today related to Robert’s chunking proposal there was an aside about special handling for ditabases and it got me thinking about this. It feels like a good change for DITA 2.0 – simplifies the architecture, simple migration – but again, I may be missing something. Chris