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Subject: RE: [dita] index terms
I'm afraid I will have to disagree rather strongly here. All Idiom's XML publishing customers, including DITA adopters, consider indexing to be high priority. Books (i.e., PDFs) are their PRIMARY deliverable. The functionality I listed in issue #45 are precisely the functionality for which we have had to build non-standard extensions for.
My point is that we cannot assume DITA adopters will not be print-centric, nor can we tell print-centric users to bugger off. They cannot bugger off. They are already here, they have set up shop, thrown lots of money at DITA, and are here to stay. We cannot tell them "don't do page ranges", because they are already doing this. We cannot tell them "don't use sort order expressions", because they are already doing this. They need this stuff, they are doing this stuff, and they are doing it even now.
The danger is that if we refuse to extend DITA to address real-world needs, the real world will build those extensions themselves in many wonderfully incompatible ways. Let this Babelization go too long, and DITA's interoperability promise will evaporate. DITA's missing indexterm functionality is one major area where that can happen.
Chris