Re: [dita] FW: Use of relationship tables

[Stanley Doherty <standoherty@google.com>]

Hi --
My 2 cents.Â

If you plan to be the person who updates all the reltablesÂin perpetuity, then using <reltable>s probably makes sense.Â
If writers who you do not know will be updating/maintaining them, it's more of a crap shoot. Some writersÂeasily grok the logic, many do not. A specialized DITA map may be the way to go from a maintenance point of view.Â

StanÂÂ

On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 11:23âAM Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com> wrote:

Hi, DITA TC colleagues.

Â

I am designing information architecture and markup for some Mayo content. Itâs a library of content called âAsk Mayo Expert,â and the targeted audience is clinicians. Some of the simplest content is about particular medical condition, for example, bipolar disorder. Here is a screen capture of how the content is currently presented:

Â

Hereâs an explanation of the areas that Iâve marked:

1. Navigation of the publication, easily handled with a DITA map that references topics such as âSymptoms (adult).â As a user clicks on different nodes in the navigation, what is displayed in the central pane changes â but the top navigation pane (include #2) does not change.
2. Links that are hand-curated by subject matter expert. The items grouped under âGuidelines & Resourcesâ tend to be links to external web sites, and the items grouped under âPatient Educationâ tend to be PDFs developed by Mayo patient education specialists for different branches of the clinical practice at Mayo. These links are applicable to ALL of the âBipolar disorderâ content.

Â

I, of course, immediately thought of expressing these relationships with a <reltable>. But when I looked through the spec, it was pretty clear that all our element-reference topics are written with focus on using relationship tables to define relationships between individual topics, rather than relationships between a publication and external links.

Â

A couple of questions:

• Are we being too old-school in how we define relationship tables in the spec?
• There will be custom processing (of course) for the Mayo DITA source, so from that perspective, I can broaden the usage of a relationship table. But I am urging that all Mayo transformations begin with using base DITA-OT transformations.
• Might I be better off with a specialized DITA map that had specific structures for âGuidelines & Resourceâ and âPatient Education,â rather than using a relationship table?

Â

Thoughts very much welcome.

Â

Kristen James Eberlein

Content Engineer | Health Education & Content Services | 507-293-0006 | eberlein.kristen@mayo.edu

My pronouns are she/her/hers.

Â