I think we are talking about a different issue here. The subflow vs inline problem has to do with how indexterms get presented to the translator. Translation tools in general don't actually process DITA: they process an intermediate representation like XLIFF or TTX. In any case, the issue that I hopefully called "resolved" does not concern the location of the index entry in DITA output.

On your issue, I would answer in two ways: * A topic prolog sits outside content, so it is irrelevant where it sits relative to shortdesc. When an indexterm is found in a topic prolog, it points to that topic and should refer to the start of that topic, not the start of whatever comes after shortdesc. So it's really a processing issue, and I would argue that with appropriate processing we can "guarantee that the effect is going to be the desired one". * You can in fact today put an indexterm in a title: you just have to wrap it in a ph element. This is just a tool/UI issue. That said, I have no objection to a proposal to have indexterms as direct children of <title>. I agree that it's an odd omission. Chris

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From: Grosso, Paul [mailto:pgro...@ptc.com] Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 9:33 AM To: di...@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [dita] indexing question We could resolve the issue this way. The problem with this solution is the case where you have a long shortdesc (which precedes the prolog) so that the point-wise, subflow indexterm in the prolog ends up on the second page of the topic so your index entry does not have the page number of the first page in the topic. So, in fact, an indexterm in a prolog really has no useful purpose, since you cannot guarantee that its effect is going to be the desired one.

So I could live with this solution provided that we allow indexterm in other places that it is currently not allowed (e.g., title) so that a user can ensure they get an index entry pointing to the first page of a topic.

And once we do that, we would then issue a "best practices" statement saying not to put indexterm within prolog.

paul

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From: Chris Wong [mailto:cwo...@idiominc.com] Sent: Friday, 2006 July 21 07:49 To: Erik Hennum; Rodolfo M. Raya Cc: David Walters; di...@lists.oasis-open.org; Esrig, Bruce (Bruce); JoAnn Hackos; Grosso, Paul Subject: RE: FW: FW: [dita] indexing question From what I understand, the issue of treating indexterm differently in topic prolog vs content was due to the misunderstanding that the content of indexterm in content actually appears as part of that content. Since we have now clarified that indexterm's content is always a subflow, we can treat indexterm uniformly in both topic prolog and content. Is my understanding correct that this issue is now resolved?

Chris

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From: Erik Hennum [mailto:ehen...@us.ibm.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 6:16 PM To: Rodolfo M. Raya Cc: Chris Wong; David Walters; di...@lists.oasis-open.org; Esrig, Bruce (Bruce); JoAnn Hackos; Grosso, Paul Subject: RE: FW: FW: [dita] indexing question

Hi, Rudolfo, Dave, and other index enthusiasts:

A lightbulb went off for me. I think we're conflating two cases here.

In the case of <keyword>, the element is an inline within content and a subflow in the prolog as Rudolfo has stated.

In both cases, <keyword> identifies a word from a vocabulary. In the inline case, the vocabulary word is delimited within the flow. In the prolog case, the vocabulary word is identified as potential metadata for search engines.

In neither case do we have a base processing expectation of producing published indexes for the <keyword> element. We have sometimes speculated about the possibility of generating indexes from inline mentions (in Eliot's term) of vocabulary words, but I believe we've always deferred that.

By constract, <indexterm> is a subflow in all cases as Chris has stated. The contents of <indexterm> must be translated, but the translation of the content in which <indexterm> is embedded isn't affected in any way by the positioning of <indexterm>. That is, <indexterm> does not delimit part of the flow.

In the prolog, <indexterm> is specified as serving two purposes: feeding index terms to search engines as part of the metadata and indexing the topic.

Digression: The case could be made to treat <term> in exactly the same way as <keyword>, using <keyword> for words from formal languages and <term> for words from cultural or social vocabularies. That would require adding <term> to the prolog.

Hoping that clarifies,

Erik Hennum ehen...@us.ibm.com

[1]Inactive hide details for "Rodolfo M. Raya" <rodo...@heartsome.net>"Rodolfo M. Raya" <rodo...@heartsome.net>

"Rodolfo M. Raya" To David <rodo...@heartsome.net> Walters/Rochester/IBM@IBMUS cc "Esrig, Bruce (Bruce)" 07/18/2006 02:15 PM <esr...@lucent.com>, Chris Wong <cwo...@idiominc.com>, di...@lists.oasis-open.org, Erik Hennum/Oakland/IBM@IBMUS, JoAnn Hackos <joan...@comtech-serv.com>, "Grosso, Paul" <pgro...@ptc.com> Subject RE: FW: FW: [dita] indexing question

On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 15:03 -0500, David Walters wrote:

Hi,

New example: The <p> text is complete.

<topic>

<prolog>

<indexterm>term one</indexterm>

<indexterm>term two</indexterm>

</prolog>

<body>

<p>Paragraph that contains term one <indexterm>term one</indexterm> and term two <indexterm>term two</indexterm> inside.</p>

</body>

</topic>

If the content of <indexterm> is completely ignored when the topic is published as XHTML, PDF or any other format, then this element should be completely ignored at translation time.

The content of <indexterm> doesn't need to be translated if it is only a location marker. The whole element can be replaced with a tag by the the translation tool.

Best regards, Rodolfo

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