Re: [Serna] A better way to display legal elements

Hedley, what would you do with the <image> element, which has a "placement"
attribute for inline or break? It's the only one I can think of at this
time with a changeable behavior, but I thought I'd toss out the prospect of
others that might have a "block or inline" identity crisis, especially as a
result of a specialization that might change its override behavior in the
content.

Would it make sense to organize the list by relative level in the document
hierarchy?  For example, <section> is probably not used as often as <p>,
which is not used as often as its allowed child elements. So by inverting
that list, the most common ones might conceivably be the easiest to pick
from, at least initially (as the history-based list is being built).  The
nice thing is that this can be inferred from the Schemas at the time the
document is opened--it does not require anyone's definition work through a
sidefile, for example, that defines which is block and which is inline
(information that is not automatically available anywhere else).

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Chair, IBM DITA Architects Board
Email: dond@...
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-244-2868 (home office)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
   --T.S. Eliot

                                                                           
             Hedley Finger                                                 
             <hfinger <at> handhold                                             
             ing.com.au>                                                To 
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             PM                                                            
                                                                   Subject 
                                       [Serna] A better way to display     
                                       legal elements                      

At the moment, all elements that are legal at a particular point are
shown in one long alphabetically ordered list.

Why not split this list into two lists, one for block elements like
<p>, and the other for embeddable elements, like <i>?  In the case of
DITA documens, you might even colour the backgrounds behind the
latter by domain.

This way, the structural elements would be largely separated from the
'formatting' elements.  By the way, I like the way that frequently
inserted elements float to the top of the list in bold whence they
can be inserted quickly with the Alt key shortcut.

Regards,
Hedley

--
Hedley Stewart Finger
28 Regent Street   Camberwell VIC 3124   Australia
Tel. +61 3 9809 1229   Mobile +61 412 461 558,
E-mail <mailto:hfinger@...>

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