For what it's worth, I have seen many use cases in DITA where the same
bookmap or map is used to represent different types of deliverables as
well as different formats of those deliverables. So I side with Larry,
and if you're leaving it as-is I'm happy. This particular use case can
be challenging in DITA too, and I feel the additional functionality we
have in DocBook is much more elegant.
Gershon
Original Message-----
From: Norman Walsh [mailto:ndw@nwalsh.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 6:11 AM
To: docbook-tc@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [docbook-tc] Assembly questions
> 4. What is @type on structure for?
>
> LRR: Type identifies a class of document that has significance to the
> rendering system: a helpsystem would have different rendering
> expectations than a book and both would have different rendering
> expectations than a tutorial. This is not as simple as the
output
> format -- I might want to render a helpsystem as CHM or as
Webhelp
> or as a printable version in PDF, but the fact that it is a
> helpsystem provides information to the rendering systems for each
> of the output formats that it might be rendering.
Ok. This is right at the heart of a fundamental dichotomy in how you and
I think about assemblies. I see them as instructions for how to
construct a new, single document to render. You, I think, see them as
instructions to the renderer directly, instructions about how to build
the final presentation artifact.
I don't know how to resolve that disconnect, so I'll just leave it alone
:-)