Hi Chris,
Sorry for the delayed reply.
Basically, having that much mark-up inline is something that my clients complain a lot about. They’re looking to conkeyref to limit the amount of material they have to look at when they’re trying to just author. An XML editor rendering all that inline is pretty unpleasant for the end user.
In this case it seems like a classic example of where you would want to break out the complexities of the mark-up outside the topic and reuse them in at processing time so that you have cleaner topics. Is this type of approach included in what you were thinking?
In the measures.JPG screenshot attached, I’ve got two topics: one where all the mark-up is held (left) and one where the user is referring to it (right) using conkeyref. This presupposes there’s a keydef in the map called “widgetmeasures” that points to the topic on the left.
This approach allows the tolerances/measures to be
1. centrally managed and reused easily across many topics
2. auto-generated or extracted from other data sources and transformed to DITA reuse targets automatically
3. less verbose and in-line-mark-up-heavy for the users trying to work with them.
This way, we (theoretically) could have a simple situation where the author could point to one <quantity> elem, and have it render only one value as appropriate for the map.
This doesn’t actually work. The problem is that the example combines conditions with conkeyref for the filtering and conkeyrefs don’t work as I’ve described them.
Conditions: Conditions usually aren’t applied until the topic hits the DOT. This means with the mark-up as it is there, the editor would (usually) render all the <quantity> sub elements inline, defeating point 3 above.
Conkeys: Keys point to one topic and then conkeys point to one element within that topic. What I’ve described here is effectively something that points to the quantity element but actually renders the values of one or the other <quantitygroup> elements.
To be using the current @conkeyref functions I don’t see a way to keep the different <quantitygroups> in one <quantity> parent, or even in one topic. The would have to be split out as I’ve shown in the measures-conkeyref.jpg screenshot attached.
I hope this all makes sense. What I’m hoping is that there’s a solution that allows the benefits listed above, but I don’t see how at the moment with today’s reuse features. Maybe I’m not thinking of something?
Cheers
Noz
PS – The .piz file attached is the topics. Needs to be renamed to .zip.
From: Chris Kravogel [mailto:christian.kravogel@seicodyne.ch]
Sent: 15 November 2012 14:50
To: Noz Urbina; dita@lists.oasis-open.org; dita-machine-industry@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: AW: [dita] Examples for the Quantities & Tolearances Proposal
Actually we have not done any thought about con/keyref. The standard con/keyref functionalities seems to us as sufficient.
The quantity element is a specialisation of phrase, and yes, it is an inline element.
May I ask you to give us some more details to your def/ref idea. I haven’t understood it yet.
Best regards
Chris
Von: Noz Urbina [mailto:noz.urbina@mekon.com]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 14. November 2012 14:39
An: Chris Kravogel; dita@lists.oasis-open.org; dita-machine-industry@lists.oasis-open.org
Betreff: RE: [dita] Examples for the Quantities & Tolearances Proposal
Hi Chris,
How do you envisage reuse happening from the <quantity> sub-elements to the actual topics?Con(key)ref? Or are the quantity definitions intended to be data-integrity checked in some other way?
Or am I misreading this and the quantities will be defined inline, e.g.,
<p>The acceptable length for the item is
</p>
?
If so the option of a def/ref pair seems like a good idea here. So the XML would be:
<p>The acceptable length for the item is <quantityref @somethingThatPointsToAQuantity/></p>
Just my thoughts.
Cheers
Noz
From: dita@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:dita@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Chris Kravogel
Sent: 14 November 2012 13:33
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org; dita-machine-industry@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] Examples for the Quantities & Tolearances Proposal
Please find enclosed the examples/use cases for the quantities and tolerances proposal.
Please reply if you have any questions or comments regarding the proposal and the examples.
Best regards
Chris
