Re: [jats-list] BITS Beta comment period to close February 8

Subject: Re: [jats-list] BITS Beta comment period to close February 8
From: "Imsieke, Gerrit, le-tex" <gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:40:35 +0100
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

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Geschdftsf|hrer: Gerrit Imsieke, Svea Jelonek,
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