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Subject: RE: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make exceptions tobehaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
"Ogden, Jeff"
<jogden@ptc.com>
01/04/2008 06:12 PM |
|
For example, if your readers are mostly experienced users, you could concentrate on creating many summary tables, and maximizing retrievability; or if you needed to create a brand presence, you could customize the transforms to apply appropriate fonts and indent style, and include some standard graphics and copyright links.
Use customization when you need
new output, with no change to the underlying semantics (you aren’t saying
anything new or meaningful about the content, only its display)."
Michael Priestley
Lead IBM DITA Architect
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
"Ogden, Jeff"
<jogden@ptc.com>
01/02/2008 03:30 PM |
|
There are four long standing items toward the end of the DITA TC agenda:
1. How much
flexibility do specializers have to make exceptions to behaviors that are
outlined in the DITA standard? (MUST, SHOULD, MAY discussion)
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200710/msg00025.html
2. What does
it mean when we say that an implementation supports the DITA standard?
Is the entire standard required or are some parts optional?
3. Is the scope
of DITA 1.2 as it is shaping up too large? Is the DITA specification becoming
too complex?
4. Is the approach
outlined in the proposed DITA 1.2 documentation TOC a good approach?
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Draft_1.2_TOC
We had some good e-mail exchanges on the first item back in late October.
The e-mail discussion is included below. I don’t think that
that discussion lead to a consensus or any action items.
I’d like to finish up the discussion on the first item, so we can start
to work our way through the next three items. I propose that anyone who
wishes send any last thoughts on this topic to the DITA TC e-mail list
between now and next Monday, that we have a brief discussion during next
week’s DITA TC call to see where we stand, and as part of that discussion
see if we agree to the following as a resolution of this issue:
1. For the
base topic and map types both the “markup/syntax” and “processing behaviors”
described in the DITA specifications are required.
2. For specializations
the “markup/syntax" described in the DITA specifications is required
unless explicitly stated otherwise.
3. For
specializations the "processing behaviors" described in the DITA
specifications are not required, but are strongly encouraged default behaviors
unless explicitly stated otherwise. Here “strongly encouraged” means
that there may be valid reasons in particular circumstances to implement
exceptions to the described default behavior, but the full implications
of such exceptions must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing
to implement behaviors that differ from the default behaviors described
in the DITA specifications.
4. For user
defined specializations specific implementations will usually require possibly
substantial additional effort on the user’s part to implement exceptions
to the default output processing behaviors as described in the DITA specifications.
Such implementations are considered fully compliant with the DITA specifications.
5. Using the
general guidelines outlined above the specification editors will review
and update all of the DITA specifications to ensure they are clear about
what MUST, SHOULD, or MAY (see RFC
2119) be done with respect to both
the DITA document types that are officially part of the standard (topic,
map, concept, glossary, reference, task, bookmap, learning/training specializations,
and machine industry specializations) and for user defined specializations
that aren’t a formal part of the standard.
6. Members
of the DITA TC are encouraged to send suggestions to the specification
editors about specific items in the specifications that should have explicitly
stated exceptions to the general rules given above. Suggested exceptions
can call for either stricter or loser requirements. Any differences
of opinion about exceptions will be resolved as part of the review and
approval process for the DITA 1.2 specifications.
-Jeff
From: Ogden, Jeff [mailto:jogden@ptc.com]
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 5:39 PM
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make exceptions
to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
We’ve had some e-mail discussions about “How much flexibility specializers
have to make exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard”.
But those discussions have been fairly quiet for 10 days or so. We
had some good discussion of this during the last DITA TC meeting. During
that discussion we agreed to move the discussion back to the DITA TC e-mail
list.
So this note is my attempt to get the e-mail discussion restarted.
I don’t think we want to talk about this issue during tomorrow’s DITA
TC call, but if we can get some good discussion going on the e-mail list
we may be ready to talk about it during next week’s call.
I think Gershon’s draft meeting minutes provide a pretty good summary
of the discussion, so far. From the draft 9 October 2007 meeting minutes:
> 4) How much flexibility do specializers
have to make exceptions to
> behaviors that are outlined
in the DITA standard?
>
> JO: We had
good discussions. MP has a more liberal approach,
> whereas I feel
we should not permit as much flexibility.
>
> MP: I'm drawing
the line between syntax and behavior. Syntax
> must be preserved.
Everything beyond there is pretty contextual.
>
> JE: There are
edge cases where we've had to deviate from the
> standard in
order to achieve the specialization we needed.
> Though these
are minor deviations that could be easily
> transformed
back into standard DITA.
>
> Discussion...
>
> MP: If someone
wants to override the stated default behavior
> (for some good
reason), I don't think we should call that going
> against the
DITA spec.
>
> Discussion...
>
> Don requested
we move this discussion to the email list.
>
> Yet further
discussion...
>
> Don asked us
to take items 3 and 4 off into 2 discussions next
> week. In the
meantime, continue discussions on-list.
Much of the discussion so far has been between Michael and me. I’d
like to see if we can get some others to express their views on this issue.
If most people don’t care or if most people agree with Michael that
specializers can do pretty much anything they want, we may not need a lot
more discussion. If this position makes some people uneasy, then
we need to find that out and we will need to continue the discussion to
figure out how and where to draw some lines.
I believe that there is agreement that specializers have a lot of control
and can change many things related to output processing behaviors of their
specializations. I think there is also agreement that we need to review
the DITA specifications to make sure they are clear about what MUST, SHOULD,
or MAY be done with respect to both the basic DITA document types that
are officially part of the standard (topic, map, concept, glossary, reference,
task, and bookmap) and for user defined specializations that aren’t a
formal part of the standard. I am a little less sure, but I think there
is agreement that we want to add some sort of conformance statement to
the DITA specifications.
The question that is up for discussion is, are specializers free to do
anything they want or are there some things that the DITA Standard makes
out of bounds even for user defined specializations that aren’t part of
the official DITA standard?
From my point of view, I’d like to see some limits on what specializers
can do in terms of referencing behaviors (what legal DITA URI’s can look
like and what they mean), and when there are interactions such as property
cascading behavior between one document and another (from a map to a topic
or from a map to a map to a topic). I want to increase the likelihood
that DITA users can share their documents, including specialized documents,
with others or move the documents into new processing environments and
still get good results. I want to reduce the amount of reimplementation
users have to do when they share their documents or move into new processing
environments.
Paul Grosso described this in terms of the distinction that is made in
XSLT between transformations and styling. Styling would be very open and
specializers could do pretty much whatever they want. Transformations
(explicit or implied) would be more tightly defined by the DITA Standard
and specializers would have less flexibility (but still some flexibility).
Paul, feel free to restate this if what I wrote here isn’t quite
right.
I’ll shut up now. Please let us know what you think.
-Jeff
From: Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com [mailto:Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 11:56 PM
To: Ogden, Jeff
Cc: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
"Ogden, Jeff" <jogden@ptc.com> wrote on 16/10/2007 07:39:06
AM:
> The question that is up for discussion is, are specializers free to
> do anything they want or are there some things that the DITA
> Standard makes out of bounds even for user defined specializations
> that aren’t part of the official DITA standard?
I prefer for the standard to make no promises, and let specializers take
as much rope as they need.
> From my point of view, I’d like to see some limits on what
> specializers can do in terms of referencing behaviors (what legal
> DITA URI’s can look like and what they mean),
Interesting that you bring up URIs. Inevitably some specialization
is going to come along that wants to link to somewhere in a way that isn't
covered by existing hrefs. We don't have a standard way of making
new href-like attributes, and to cater to those specializations we need
to. Or do we: is this what data/@href is for?
And because that made me think of xlink, it reminds me that something we
have also not discussed for an awfully long time is namespaces. Are
DITA specializers allowed to add namespaced attributes?
> I want to increase the likelihood that DITA users can
> share their documents, including specialized documents, with others
> or move the documents into new processing environments and still get
> good results. I want to reduce the amount of reimplementation
users
> have to do when they share their documents or move into new
> processing environments.
This is a little tangential, but depending on how we approach a solution,
it might not be.
I suppose that a common scenario is that I have a document that contains
a specialization, but for $transform I don't have any processing to handle
that specialization, so I get fallback behaviour.
Sometimes fallback behaviour is fine. The UI domain, for instance,
is hardly groundbreaking, and falling back to <ph> is not going to
hurt.
Sometimes fallback behaviour is ugly. The Utilities domain's <imagemap>
element doesn't really work if rendered as a plain <fig>: you end
up seeing the coordinates as plain text. (I suppose the real culprit
here is the <shape> element rather than its ancestor imagemap, and
that if it were omitted you'd get something at least presentable.)
How can the processor know when fallback behaviour is acceptable? Is
there some way for a <shape> to say to the processing for its base
topic/keyword, "skip me" (or "die")? (Obviously
the answer today is "no, there isn't", so really my question
is "is this something we want?".)
--
Deborah Pickett
Information Architect, Moldflow Corporation, Melbourne
Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com
From: Michael Priestley [mailto:mpriestl@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:21 PM
To: Eliot Kimber
Cc: dita
Subject: Re: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
Hi Eliot,
Re:
> All addressing of DITA-governed content by DITA-governed content.
That is,
> you cannot, within a specialization, change the rules for resolving
hrefs
> (or any other DITA-defined addressing mechanism)) to DITA-based content.
Couldn't the implementer choose to create hoverhelp for a link to APItopics
by summarizing the syntax, rather than always pulling the shortdesc? Agreed
the syntax should be consistent, but why limit what we do with that syntax?
> Conref. You cannot change the constraints or effective result that
conref produces.
Couldn't an implementer decide that they want to limit reuse in their organization
to content coming from specific directories? For example, check the conref
path to ensure that it starts with "/reuse/"?
It seems to me that one of the advantages of having conref as an explicit
process rather than something that happens as part of parsing (as with
entities or XIncludes) is that you can, as an implementer, choose to enhance
or restrict the processing according to your local requirements.
Michael Priestley
Lead IBM DITA Architect
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
-----Original Message-----
From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:10 PM
To: dita
Subject: Re: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
On 10/15/07 4:39 PM, "Ogden, Jeff" <jogden@ptc.com wrote:
> The question that
is up for discussion is, are specializers free to do
> anything they want or are there some things that the DITA Standard
makes
> out of bounds even for user defined specializations that aren't
part of
> the official DITA standard?
> From my point of view, I'd like to see some limits on what specializers
> can do in terms of referencing behaviors (what legal DITA URI's
can look
> like and what they mean), and when there are interactions such
as
> property cascading behavior between one document and another
(from a map
> to a topic or from a map to a map to a topic). I want
to increase the
> likelihood that DITA users can share their documents, including
> specialized documents, with others or move the documents into
new
> processing environments and still get good results. I
want to reduce
> the amount of reimplementation users have to do when they share
their
> documents or move into new processing environments.
The DITA specification defines a number of core processing semantics that
constitute the core processing infrastructure that makes DITA both work
functionally (that is, when implemented, those features produce the result
that you presumably want because you're using DITA) and allows documents
and document processing to be reasonably interchangeable.
I think that this infrastructure includes the following:
- All addressing of DITA-governed content by DITA-governed content. That
is, you cannot, within a specialization, change the rules for resolving
hrefs
(or any other DITA-defined addressing mechanism)) to DITA-based content.
- Conref. You cannot change the constraints or effective result that conref
produces.
Where things start to get a little cloudier, and where I think this
discussion started, is in the area of the implications for topic references
and in particular how do topic references affect the effective properties
of the topics they reference?
The issue here is that while this area can be viewed as concrete in the
way that addressing and conref are, it can also be seen as a matter of
presentation style. For example, for some specializations of metadata
used
within topicref I want their values to propagate and replace values on
referenced topics and for other values I do not. A blanket DITA-defined
rule
of "metadata always propagates" or "metadata never propagates"
would be
wrong some of the time so we can't define it. That leads to Paul's original
question of how can specializations express their intent in a case like
this that allows a tool like Arbortext Editor to do the expected thing
automatically? Clearly in this specific case there's a need for some sort
of schema-level way to indicate the processing intent.
Simple enough to design for this case, but how many cases are there?
Probably lots. That suggests you need a more general mechanism for this
sort of thing. That will be, necessarily, complex. Easier to just punt
and say
"DITA has no opinion". But that doesn't help Paul. Seems like,
for the
moment, there's no easy answer to this question.
At a minimum DITA has to define clear default behaviors for those areas
where processors can legitimately do different things.
I guess I would need to see some specific cases where a specialization
wants to deviate from either the defined or suggested behavior to evaluate
whether or not the deviation is processing or style, there's a way to
usefully
parameterize the behavior choices or whether the requirement can be
satisfied in a different way. Or where, as above, DITA either says nothing
or isn't clear and there are multiple useful ways that a processor could
behave.
It's also worth saying that while DITA should "just work" that's
always in
terms of the default behavior, whatever it is, as defined by the DITA
spec.
Specializations that want something other than the default are on their
own and there should be no expectation on anyone's part that
specialization-specific stuff will magically happen without some
implementation effort.
In that respect, DITA-based applications are no different from any other
purpose-built XML application in that you may have to do a bit of local
customization of your generic tools to get what you want. However, with
DITA
it should always be less (or no greater than) it would have otherwise
been
because DITA gives you so much out of the box.
For example, for demonstration purposes I've defined a specialization
of
reference for capturing animal field guide entries, including
specializations of <data for capturing the Linnaean classification
of the
animals described. No DITA-aware processor is going to give me any special
support for authoring these classifications but I'd probably want to build
a little classification editor for these values since they need to be
validated and could be gathered from external data sources and whatnot.
I
would not fault any DITA-supporting editor for not providing that but
I
would expect a way to add it without too much difficulty.
Cheers,
Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
Really Strategies, Inc.
From: Michael Priestley [mailto:mpriestl@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:41 PM
To: Michael Priestley
Cc: dita; Eliot Kimber
Subject: Re: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
Clarification:
in the href overriding example, a processor might choose to create a preview
by summarizing specialized elements in a target's <refsyn> or equivalent,
rather than using the <shortdesc>. This wouldn't affect the syntax
of the href, but does change the expected processing from the default.
I realized in my wording below I used the word syntax twice to mean two
different things :-)
Main point remains the same: I think everything in "expected behavior"
is expected default behavior; everything in "expected markup/syntax"
is required unless otherwise stated. The syntax for href and conref should
be standard; the expected behavior should be default.
Michael Priestley
Lead IBM DITA Architect
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
> -----Original Message-----
From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:04 PM
To: Michael Priestley
Cc: dita
Subject: Re: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
On 10/25/07 2:41 PM, "Michael Priestley" <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>
wrote:
> Clarification:
>
> in the href overriding example, a processor might choose to create
a
> preview by summarizing specialized elements in a target's <refsyn>
or
> equivalent, rather than using the <shortdesc>. This wouldn't
affect the
> syntax of the href, but does change the expected processing from the
> default.
What you've described is rendition, not address resolution.
That is, when I say "addressing" I mean "the object that
is addressed by the
href value" which is different with what you do with that thing once
you have it.
That is, how or if you produce tooltips in some rendition is entirely
a
matter of style. What those tooltips apply to (or at least what the initial
source of their ultimate value is) is a function of invariant address
processing.
That is, you can choose to produce or not produce tooltips, you can't
change
what "mytopic.dita#topicid/elementid" means from an address
resolution standpoint.
[Note that this is one problem with DITA not using standard addressing
mechanisms: it provides no built in mechanism for choice in how you do
addressing at the fragment identifier level, which means you either have
non-DITA stuff or you use URIs that have to be interpreted by a specific
URI
resolver. This is a fundamental problem with DITA 1.x that must be corrected
in DITA 2.]
> Main point remains the same: I think everything in "expected
behavior" is
> expected default behavior; everything in "expected markup/syntax"
is
> required unless otherwise stated. The syntax for href and conref should
be
> default.
But the point is that that there are some things in DITA that are not
"expected behavior" but "required behavior", which
includes, I assert, all
addressing and conref.
Cheers,
E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
Really Strategies, Inc.
From: Ogden, Jeff [mailto:jogden@ptc.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 6:18 PM
To: Michael Priestley; Eliot Kimber
Cc: dita
Subject: RE: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
Eliot, thanks for your comments and for getting this conversation started
again.
In response to Michael’s comment/question:
> Couldn't an implementer decide that they want to limit reuse in their
organization
> to content coming from specific directories? For example, check the
conref path
> to ensure that it starts with "/reuse/"?
I don’t see a problem with this as long as the implementer is being more
restrictive than what is required by the standard. The standard says
that conref values are URIs that reference DITA content with a number of
checks to make sure they content being referenced is legal or is likely
to be legal in the new context. Limiting the references to a particular
path isn’t violating that. The conref values that start with /reuse/ will
always be valid URI and with a bit of luck the thing being referenced will
be DITA content that is legal in the current content. An implementation
will not have to do anything special to make the required checks. You can’t
expect other implementations to impose the same limitations automatically,
but that is OK.
-Jeff
From: Michael Priestley [mailto:mpriestl@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 6:22 PM
To: Eliot Kimber
Cc: dita
Subject: Re: [dita] How much flexibility do specializers have to make
exceptions to behaviors that are outlined in the DITA standard?
I guess I was having trouble separating out "addressing" as a
behavior from the various actual processes that use addressing. I see your
point.
I was thinking of addressing as "what the syntax means" - for
example topicid/elementid - we wouldn't want that to be overridden by processing,
it's not even clear to me what overriding that would mean. But I buy that
processing for addresses should not ignore or misinterpret the actual information
in the address. That said, all the processes that do something with the
info at that address should be overrideable - like shortdesc pulling, link
creation, etc. etc.
For conref, which goes beyond the address, where do we draw the line? Is
there a problem with my example? Or is it another case where the syntax's
meaning is preserved, so even if the exact behavior as described in the
spec doesn't apply it still is preserving the important part of the process,
ie the meaning of the address?
As another conref example: we say you can generalize on the fly where necessary/appropriate
- I can imagine someone overriding the generalization to, for example,
generate titles for specialized sections that are being generalized during
conref. Is that ok? Are there other conref overrides that wouldn't be ok,
for example overriding the process to allow conref across specializations
without generalization at all?
Michael Priestley
Lead IBM DITA Architect
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
The End
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