16 messages in org.oasis-open.lists.ditaRe: [dita] proposal on "vocabulary" t...| From | Sent On | Attachments |
|---|---|---|
| Erik Hennum | Sep 26, 2004 9:09 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Sep 28, 2004 8:55 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Sep 28, 2004 8:55 am | |
| W. Eliot Kimber | Sep 29, 2004 6:49 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Sep 30, 2004 8:14 am | |
| JoAnn Hackos | Sep 30, 2004 11:24 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Sep 30, 2004 12:08 pm | |
| Erik Hennum | Sep 30, 2004 2:39 pm |  .gif, .gif, .gif, 8 more |
| Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre | Sep 30, 2004 5:13 pm | |
| W. Eliot Kimber | Oct 1, 2004 6:32 am | |
| Robin Cover | Oct 1, 2004 8:12 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Oct 1, 2004 8:23 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Oct 1, 2004 9:12 am | |
| Esrig, Bruce (Bruce) | Oct 1, 2004 9:13 am | |
| Michael Priestley | Oct 1, 2004 9:34 am | |
| Robin Cover | Oct 1, 2004 11:09 am |
| Subject: | Re: [dita] proposal on "vocabulary" terminology | |
|---|---|---|
| From: | Robin Cover (rob...@oasis-open.org) | |
| Date: | Oct 1, 2004 8:12:40 am | |
| List: | org.oasis-open.lists.dita | |
I try not to have opinions about terminology unless it appears critical to avoid misleading users (through adoption of a definition that's counter-intuitive). In this case it feels fairly important.
For the target object, "document type" feels wrong because it's already overloaded with explicitly defined precise meanings (as well as with not-so-precise related usages).
I would prefer "vocabulary" in this setting because it most easily leads one to think about a set of names (lexical features) represented in the collection of all names in the set. That's more to the point than "type," which carries other connotations from its usage in many computing domains and formalisms.
"Vocabulary" isn't overloaded as far as I know in its use as a precise term -- and I had forgotten about the XML Namespaces spec, where it refers to element and attribute names (but apparently not to names in PIs, entities, notations, etc). Few people are going to be misled because of the usage in Namespaces.
Most users, I think, will get the right idea correctly from "vocabulary" because it's an imprecise word for a collection of named markup constructs, including elements, attributes and related named aggregations of constructs.
My $0.00002
- Robin
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
JoAnn Hackos wrote:
Is there a reason that we cannot use "document type" except for an intrusion into the DTD world? I think information developers and architects are more likely to understand the term "doc type" rather than a more esoteric term like "vocabulary"? I'd like to err on the side of usability and user-centeredness if possible. JoAnn
"document type" is certainly the most accurate if you take it to mean "abstract document type" (that is, a set of types distinct from any implementation expression of them) but I think that most people don't make that distinction, especially people like many of us with deep SGML brain damage, where there was no obvious need to distinquish between the abstract document type and its syntactic expression.
That's one reason I prefer "vocabulary"--it's completely (and in the namespace spec, explicitly) divorced from any particular syntactic or formal definition or expression of the vocabulary.
Cheers,
E.
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