xmleditor-support-bounces at xmlmind.com wrote on 03/30/2006 03:33:55 AM: > I tend to agree that stepping through a bunch of required-element > prompts just trying to open a template is annoying. So, I'll suggest > again (for the last time, I promise ;-) that enabling elementTemplates > in lenient mode could provide a user the quickest/easiest way out of > lenient mode. Is it difficult or impossible for you to enable this > behavior? Or do you just *hate* the idea because it violates some > time-honored principle of "heavy-duty XML users"? ;-)
Mark, I agree that I wouldn't push any more on this normally-functioning feature of XXE. In the broader world of DITA authoring, the best practice is to author directly in the topic-typed schema of choice, whether task, concept, or reference. From the point of view of DITA gurus, the ditabase structure is mainly a storage management aid that some authors use to manage loading and working on sets of topics at once. Since most authors will manage their structures through a separate map rather than through the fixed nesting hierarchy of a mixed set of types in the ditabase structure, it is simply not worth as much effort on the front end as, say, setting up a standard template for the reference headings that you want to pre-generate with particular titles. If you have to do anything with the ditabase template, I would say set your template up to provide peer types of concept, task, and reference with the dita wrapper so that the writer can select and delete the ones they don't need, a few more keystrokes than inserting the one they want, but at least this would seem to fulfill the XXE need to populate the template with something, and in a way that is not unduly punitive. If all you want is one task, then by far the friendliest way to get it is to just start with a task schema. I'd far rather see Hussein and team working on making the map support be as intuitive as possible, as this is the single most repeated authoring and maintenance activity that represents the reuse and recombining benefits of DITA. If you have not looked at them yet, the DITA Toolkit download site now has several specialization plugins that you can use to support API authoring, and specifically Java API authoring. Supporting the Java API schema/DTD with an override CSS for its auto-generated headings would completely eliminate the need for a pre-configured template for the generic reference type. Just a thought on how you can move specific setup concerns from the templates themselves to the markup and style support of the special authoring types you might use most. Regards, -- Don Day Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee IBM Lead DITA Architect Email: dond at us.ibm.com 11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758 Phone: +1 512-838-8550 T/L: 678-8550 "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" --T.S. Eliot
