Dear Jeff et al.,
We are currently adopting and adapting BITS for a German publisher who
is already working with an NLM derivative (APA Journal Archive 0.3) for
journals.
Please find our remarks so far below. Some of them dont apply
specifically to BITS but to the whole JATS family.
book-part/@dtd-version seems redundant when the book parts are in the
same file
apparent lack of canonical inclusion / reference mechanisms (such as
XInclude and XLink) for primary content: storing book parts as separate
resources and assembling the book by means of inclusion or reference
if individual resources such as book-parts are wrapped in a
book-part-wrapper and XInclude is used for inclusion, one should check
whether commonly used XInclude processors (Id use xmllint or
http://www.w3.org/TR/xproc/#c.xinclude) are able to include only a
subtree of the included document. If they dont, you should consider
whether the wrapper element is really necessary.
(some?) emphasis elements should act as toggles. Or is it just italic?
http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/extensions/bits/tag-library/0.2/?elem=italic
I think this is acceptable for a generic emphasis element, but may be
problematic when content (an inline formula symbol, for example) should
be rendered italic no matter what. Making authors use MathML for those
symbols is a thing that is hard to enforce.
lack of nested tables
in list-items, block-level content is mandatory, while in table cells,
only inline content may appear. Apart from this perceived inconsistency,
it is important for our customer to be able to put multiple paragraphs
or lists into a cell. This may be alleviated by the fact that lists are
permitted within td content. We have identified a single introductory
paragraph with a subsequent list as the most common multiple-block-level
situation within cells. So one could argue that the model already
permits this. On the other hand, a list between paragraphs may be
rendered differently (with more vertical space around it) than an
embedded list, for a reason (lists that continue a paragraphs sentence
vs. list items that contain entire sentences).
If you want to avoid the default HTML td or CALS entry model of both
inline and block-level content allowed, but only one of them in a single
cell and rather opt for either inline-only or block-level-only, Id
argue for block-level-only.
no support for generated ToCs, i.e., an empty toc element whose
purpose is just to signify that a generated ToC should be included at
this point. Something like <toc depth="3"/>, that is, for generated
ToCs, one should be able to specify (simple) generation rules.
Apart from these criticisms or suggestions, we think that BITS is
already quite mature.
FYI, we converted the DTDs to RNG and enhance the imported unmodified
BITS with RDFa (will be used for marking up multiple-choice tests etc.)
and CSSa (additional CSS attributes for when theres no native element,
such as for capturing a table cells background color in the absence of
knowledge about the colorings semantic purpose).
CSSa:
https://plus.google.com/b/112626981578679343921/112626981578679343921/posts/b7JYN4qk7N1
This leads to another wish: we currently patch each element that is
allowed to carry an @xml:lang attribute in the following way:
<define name="sec-atts" combine="interleave">
<ref name="css_attributes"/>
<ref name="Rdfa.attrib"/>
</define>
If there was a parameter entity for global attributes in the DTD (which
may default to @xml:lang), it would be easier to add orthogonal,
attributes-based vocabularies.
Gerrit
On 2013-01-15 21:46, Beck, Jeff (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E] wrote:
BITS (the Book Interchange Tag Suite), a JATS extension for tagging book material, was released as a draft (v 0.2) in October, 2012.
In case you missed it, details are on the NLM site: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/extensions/bits/
The Tag Library is available online: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/extensions/bits/tag-library/0.2/
If you have any comments or suggestions for the Book Model, please get them in by February 8, 2013. You can submit them to this list (jats-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx).
Look for a Version 1.0 in the (possibly late) Spring!
Thank you for all of the comments we've already received.
Jeff Beck
--
Gerrit Imsieke
Geschdftsf|hrer / Managing Director
le-tex publishing services GmbH
Weissenfelser Str. 84, 04229 Leipzig, Germany
Phone +49 341 355356 110, Fax +49 341 355356 510
gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx, http://www.le-tex.de
Registergericht / Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Leipzig
Registernummer / Registration Number: HRB 24930
Geschdftsf|hrer: Gerrit Imsieke, Svea Jelonek,
Thomas Schmidt, Dr. Reinhard Vvckler