General DITA questions

variables and entities

Forum topic: Submitted by ngn_at_ebbr on Thu, 2009-03-26 12:17.

So ... in FrameMaker, I'm happy to replace things like product names and department names by variables; saves typing, increases accuracy and so on. How do I set about applying the same approach in DITA? for the time being, I'm working with a DITA-aware editor (XMLMind) to get a clearer idea of how things fit together.

attribution/source/byline

Forum topic: Submitted by ngn_at_ebbr on Mon, 2009-03-09 10:54. Last updated on Mon, 2009-03-09 10:59.

Some of the definitions in a definition-list have clearly-defined attributions, for example ISO. It seems logical, if the goal is to produced a set of structured and searchable files, to use something like

[dlentry]

[dt]name of term goes here[/dt]

[dd]definition of term goes here

[source]attribution goes here[/source]

[/dd]

[/dlentry]

[source] is clearly not the element to use here, though; nor is [author].

Any suggestions?

lists and their introductions

Forum topic: Submitted by ngn_at_ebbr on Mon, 2009-03-09 10:36.

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

Forum topic: Submitted by ngn_at_ebbr on Tue, 2009-02-17 09:24.

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

Why the acronym tags?

Forum topic: Submitted by sorenweimann on Wed, 2008-11-19 19:12. Last updated on Wed, 2008-11-19 19:13.

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.