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Subject: Fw: WG: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue
On behalf of Chris Kravogel, who is having TC mail issues lately.
----- Forwarded by Don Day/Austin/IBM on 10/17/2006 08:16 AM -----
"Christian
Kravogel"
<christian.kravog To
el@seicodyne.ch> Don Day/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
cc
10/17/2006 08:09
AM Subject
WG: [dita] Status of Nested
Sections Issue
Don
The first posting was a forward from an E-Mail from Mr. Pellizzari from
Novartis.
(Embedded image moved to file: pic17032.gif)
SeicoDyne GmbH
Eichenstrasse 16
CH-6015 Reussbühl
Switzerland
Tel: +41 41 534 66 97
Mob: +41 78 790 66 97
www.seicodyne.com
christian.kravogel@seicodyne.com
Von: Christian Kravogel [mailto:christian.kravogel@seicodyne.ch]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. Oktober 2006 17:04
An: 'dita@lists.oasis-open.org'
Betreff: RE: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue
Hi folks, enclosed I have posted a reply I have received from a customer
about the issue Nested Sections.
Von: -@novartis.com [mailto:-@novartis.com]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. Oktober 2006 10:17
An: SeicoDyne DITA
Betreff: Re: WG: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue
Hi Christian,
Thanks for forwarding me this mail. I am glad to see that I have prominent
support for my critics concerning the nesting structure of DITA.
The problem of artificially shredding information which belongs together
into topics to make DITA work is really pressing for us. While I see in
e.g. our Clinical Study Reports approx. 10-20 topics (statistics, ethics,
pk/pd etc, - all according to ICH standards), the limited nesting in DITA
creates about 100 topics.
This makes the user interface slow, makes medical writers jump around
topics to edit related information and makes the whole enterprise to move
towards XML more complex. This is probably the one reason while Novartis
may very well abandon DITA after the PoC, creating our own Schema which
re-builds DITA's specialization mechanism but abandons the more dogmatic
restrictions.
Best regards,
Josef
ps. You may forward this mail to any mailing list you think it fits - we
have an interest to find others with similar problems to influence the
standardization commitee.
Josef Pellizzari
Novartis Pharma AG
(Embedded image moved to file: pic17950.gif)
"SeicoDyne DITA"
<dita@seicodyne.ch> To: <-@novartis.com>
cc:
Subject: WG: [dita] Status
10.10.2006 09:24 of Nested Sections Issue
Category:
FYI
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: W. Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@innodata-isogen.com]
Gesendet: Montag, 9. Oktober 2006 18:28
An: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Betreff: [dita] Status of Nested Sections Issue
In some work we (Innodata Isogen) is doing, we're finding the lack of
nestable sections to be a very serious impediment to using DITA
effectively for marking up legacy documents as-is (that is, without
re-authoring the content to account for poor writing practice in the
original).
I reviewed the list to see what the disposition of this issue is. I saw
several proposals but no disposition.
To mind the obvious and simplest thing to do is to allow sections to
nest in 1.1.
What do I need to do to formally submit this as a proposal for a vote?
The particular use case in this instance is a semiconductor data sheet,
where the entire sheet is clearly one topic but no subsection of the
sheet can be considered a topic in any rhetorical sense because, by
definition, the information in each subsection only applies to the
specific component. It would be prima-facie nonsense to make, for
example, the "Min/Max" section of the data sheet a separate topic
because that is information that would never be useful either for re-use
or as a topic included in some other package not associated with the
overall component. Even more so for any subdivisions within the major
sections of the data sheet.
And of course the use case for fairly typical technical manuals seems
obvious to me as well but that certainly wasn't in evidence in the
message history.
In essence the notion that information that is not rhetorically a topic
should be marked as a topic just seems so fundamentally wrong to me, as
a technical writer and as a XML practitioner, that I marvel that anyone
involved with DITA would even suggest it. As Paul Prescode pointed out,
to mark things up as topics that are not topics is to erode the whole
value of topics as a concept.
Cheers,
E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9390 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78759
(214) 954-5198
ekimber@innodata-isogen.com
www.innodata-isogen.com
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