This seems to be a topic that many people
feel strongly about. Some people take the side that Bruce is advocating in his
message (the more restrictive docbook approach?) and others take the other
approach (the less constrained html approach?). Both sides have justifications
for their preferred approach. The arguments go round and round.
DITA 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 all allow either approach.
This allows DITA to support both sides and to serve as a base for adding
further constraints via specialization, via the new DITA 1.2 constraints
mechanism, or through the adoption of authoring guidelines that may or may not
be enforced.
I don’t think that we can make any
changes here without making existing valid DITA documents invalid. And I
don’t think we should do that. If we had agreement that it was
something that we wanted to change (something we don’t have and which I
think we are unlikely to get in the future), the soonest I think we could
consider changes is DITA 2.0. I’ve no idea when we might expect to see
a DITA 2.0.
For DITA 1.2 we plan to clarify the
wording in the DITA Architecture Specification and in the DITA Language
Specification to make it clear that the different styles of list markup do not necessarily
imply or require different output formatting, but that different output
formatting is allowed. Also, that we encourage, but do not require that the
formatting of lists for different outputs be consistent no matter which list
markup style is used. These are the two points that Eliot wanted clarified,
but because people feel strongly about this stuff the discussion quickly
expanded to the broader and more philosophic discussion.
Or at least that is where I think we left
things the last time we discussed this.
-Jeff
From: Bruce Nevin
(bnevin) [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 12:22
PM
To:
Cc: Bruce Nevin (bnevin)
Subject: RE: [dita] Proposal for
Consideration: Default Behavior for List Items
[Not sure
if this is the right way to contribute to this thread, but I don't see any
contributor hooks on the page or in the Help. Responding to http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200804/msg00060.html.]
I agree
that rendering is an OT issue.
The real
issue IMO is that <li> permits #PCDATA and phrase-level elements. These
should only be permitted in paragraph-level elements, and any element that
permits paragraph-level or "larger" elements as children should not
permit #PCDATA and phrase-level elements. This behavior seems to be a relic of
the HTML standard.
It is
easy for OT and vendors to insert <p> by default, and if <li>
begins with some other child element it is only a minor nuisance to delete
<p> or insert that child ahead of <p>.
This
would simplify the work of rendering and remove the ambivalence that is the
topic of this thread.
Perhaps
this is already being considered for 1.3 or 2.0.
/Bruce Nevin
