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Re: A straw proposal for help topics in DocBook
/ "Nancy (Paisner) Harrison" <nancyh@rational.com> was heard to say:
| I, on the other hand, am concerned with not allowing sections in the
| mix, since that removes a transparent way to reuse data between
| print and online delivery.
If you need "sections" in a topic, use nested topics. Allowing
sections in topics and topics in sections...this way lies madness. :-)
| I also think we need some navigation elements that facilitate the
| building of online help and the kinds of online hierarchies or webs
| that online help requires. One piece of this is probably
| bi-directional links.
Can you construct some use cases for bi-directional links?
| Another might be 'onlineseealso' and/or
| 'relatedtopics' elements that consist only of one or more
| links/xrefs.
Why not simply:
<topic><title>See Also</title>
<simplelist type="inline">
<member><xref linkend="topic1"/></member>
<member><xref linkend="topic2"/></member>
<member><xref linkend="topic3"/></member>
</simplelist>
</topic>
I can see that you might want to build relationships at a higher
level, in fact I already do in informal ways for some of the documents
that I maintain. For example, you might want to group topics together
and say that "these are related" which would have the semantic that
they should all "see-also" each other.
My instinct, however, is to provide that markup "out of band" using
extended XLinks or something. I'm confident, at least, that
containment is the wrong strategy for tackling this problem.
Be seeing you,
norm
--
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | I have seen the truth and it makes
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | no sense.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |
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