MHonArc v2.5.0b2 -->
dita message
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [List Home]
Subject: "Mention" Elements (was index terms)
In several recent posts I refered to "mention" elements.
I wanted to make sure everyone was clear what I meant.
By "mention" element I mean elements that identify mentions of
domain-specific objects or concepts. Most inline domain-specific
elements are mentions, e.g. "command", "function", "class", etc.
One use of mention elements is of course to enable typographic
distinction of the names.
But a much more interesting use of mentions is to help optimize
retrieval by letting you search on the mention type.
This searching can be expressed by a literal XML-aware keyword search
but it can also be expressed as automatic indexing functions.
That is, given a mention element "command" that identifies mentions of
commands for some program, you can easily generate entries of the form:
command
foo 14, 24, 25
bar 11, 104
baz 5, 9
Where "foo", "bar", and "baz" are identified in the topic content like so:
<p>Use the <command>foo</command> to do blah blah</p>
Mention elements can also be used to generate links from reference
entries for the thing mentioned (i.e., command reference topics) and the
mentions.
Thus, mention elements are very powerful and very important. With a
little bit of discipline much, if not all, of the indexing done with
explicit index markers can be replaced by automatically indexing mention
elements.
Mention elements may also require additional metadata to make automatic
indexing or linking fully functional. For example, for the "command"
example, it might be necessary to bind mention instances to the system
component the command applies to, i.e.:
<command syscomp="admin">createUser</command>
This type of sophisticated use of mention elements is one of the things
that DITA explicitly enables and encourages.
In addition, the type of automatic linking and indexing that mention
elements enable is crucial in a re-use environment where you want to
avoid explicit links as much as possible.
Cheers,
Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9390 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 372-8841
ekimber@innodata-isogen.com
www.innodata-isogen.com
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [List Home]