RE: [dita] On the DITAVAL file

MHonArc v2.5.0b2 -->

dita message

[Date Prev]
 | [Thread Prev]
 | [Thread Next]
 | [Date Next]

--

[Date Index]
 | [Thread Index]
 | [List Home]

Subject: RE: [dita] On the DITAVAL file

From: Michael Priestley <>

To: "Chris Wong" <>

Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 10:17:59 -0500

The use case is less about version management
and more about producing drafts or new revisions of a document that highlight
what changes have been made since the last revision. Since not all changes
are worth drawing attention to (eg minor grammatical corrections or style
changes), typically it gets set directly by the author during the editing
process. 

Sometimes it gets set for flagging only
during the internal review draft, to help reviewers focus in on changed
parts of the docs (for example, if an install procedure is exactly the
same as last release except for two or three steps or an install path,
the writer would put a rev attribute on those steps, and the reviewer could
quickly verify that those changes were accurate). 

There are times where the end-user cares
about differences as well, however: let's say for a product where most
users are familiar with the previous version and work with it daily (perhaps
as administrators) and won't be reading the documentation in depth but
do want to be able to gloss the tasks they perform daily to see where they
need to vary their procedure.

Hope this makes sense,

Michael Priestley

IBM DITA Architect

Classification Schema PDT Lead



"Chris Wong"
<> 

02/07/2006 10:00 AM

To

"Jennifer Linton"
<>, "DITA-TC \(E-mail\)"
<>

cc

Subject

RE: [dita] On the DITAVAL
file

Something that I never really
understood is the usefulness of @rev and the corresponding revprops element
in DITAVAL. Traditional versioning (CVS/ClearCase/Subversion/etc) operates
at the file level, which means we do version diffs at the topic level at
best. Having revision markers down to the phrase level always seemed unmanageable
to me: most versioning software would not support that. We just end up
using using versioning software to get 2 revisions of a DITA file (topic)
and diffing those with an XML differ to generate revision markup.
 
How do you (and IBM) use @rev/revprops?
 
Chris