Frequently Asked Questions

lists and their introductions

Typographically, a paragraph is one thing and a list is another - even if the content of the paragraph is nothing than more the lead-in to the list. That would suggest something like [paragraph] [/paragraph] [ul] [/ul]

Logically, the introductory paragraph and the list form a unit of information. That would suggest something like [paragraph] [ul] [/ul] [/paragraph].

The 1.1 language spec. I have to hand appears to allow both. What do you experienced users think?

which type? what element? two small questions

Making yet another try at transforming a real document into DITA, with FrameMaker 8.0 and XML Mind to hand, and enjoying it no end!

Two questions so far:

which topic type

I have lists of roles and responsibilities, plus lists of working-groups and members: concept or reference? I'm inclined to say Reference, but would welcome advice

 what element

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Why the acronym tags?

One thing keeps bugging me about DITA... Why are a lot of tags acronyms and not natural language? Language is a code for people to learn (as we all know). So why put another code (the acronyms) on top of that? It only serves to complicate the accessibility of DITA. It doesn't seem very DITAish to overcomplicate things like that.

The corporate world suffers from the Acronym Disease, but I would think that professional communicators like us tech writers, would be clever enough to avoid this kind of exclusion and inaccessibility.

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How to present visual tags in output that correspond to element attributes in a topic

Hi all,

We have a requirement to deliver context-sensitive content based on metadata on elements within a topic. One output is embedded into a third-party app and the correct content for each context is shown based on the metadata attributes. A custom XSLT is required to produce the right schema (i.e. we bypass DITA-OT processing entirely).

In PDF and XHTML, we need to show the content of all elements, with some visual way of describing their contexts. We use DITA-OT processing for these outputs.

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Can't get <navtitle> to display in web output

Hello all,

 

I am authoring topics using Arbortext, and when I compose output for the web, my navtitles do not display in the navigation. The topics are defined in the map as such:

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