S1000D Issue 4

The long awaited ASD Issue 4 has now been released.

This issue marks a departure for ASD from their recent practise. They are only providing Schemas and no SGML or XML DTDs. I can't say I am too surprised by this, the maintenance of four sets of structures (SGML DTD, XML DTD, Flat Schema and Schema Master) must have been a nightmare.

I have had a very quick run through - not at all exhaustive - and a number of things are obviously changed. I have listed them briefly below:

Element Names

Gone are all the cryptic largely 8 character element names and in are a loads of others. Most seem to be reasonably obvious. 

Those that are references of one sort or another all have the characters 'ref' at the end of the name. This does mean that REFDM has become dmref - but I guess that we can all live with that!

subpara1 to n and para0

These have gone. We now have a recursive element called levelledpara. I never have been one of those people who are stuck in a certain way and don't want to change. However, when I first encountered the S1000D specification, almost pre Issue 1 Change 6, I was used the idea of recursive 'level paragraph' type elements and did enquire why there were limitations on how many levels we could have.

The argument then was that it forced the writers of the information to think seriously about the structure of the data module and how it was going to appear to the end user. At the time I thought that it was a good argument and to be honest I still do.

I have seen some pretty horrific data modules in my time and do not have much confidence that someone will take advantage of this new structure and have 10 or more levels. I guess that those who are writing this type of structure in their documents have never been at the receiving end of 'handbooks' of this type.

The whole concept of a Data Module is that it should be small and not of novel length. What I think that this change will encourage is the writing of ridiculously large Data Modules without any thought to breaking the information down further. I suppose we have to ask the question: Why was this change necessary? Is it, as I have heard, because the Air Craft Manufacturers want to pour a complete CMM into a Data Module? If this is the case then they are flying (sorry about that!) in the face of S1000D and ignoring the fact that a CMM contains data of a fairly wide variety of types of information - each with its own ICN.

I guess that this is something that is going to have to be tackled by the Business Rules.

step1 to step n

I see that the same has happened here as for the subpara elements from Issue 3 and before.

keepwithnext

I have stumbled on this attribute. Goodness me what on earth is this doing here? This is formatting, and, as is often declared as part of SGML and XML, quote "the data generator is divorced from formatting allowing him or her to dedicate themselves to writing accurate, concise, unambiguous text (which conforms to Simplified English if required)" endquote. I can see many an otherwise productive hour being wasted here by some authors trying to make the data look 'nice' on the screen. I guess some do not realise that as soon as it appears on someone else's screen or page the formatting probably goes out of the window.

Surely in an IETP this is totally irrelevant. And in a hard copy book this would be part of the styles which are attributed to the element. I first spotted this in the proceduralStep element.

Again, the Business Rules will be king here.

level attribute

I notice that in the attributes associated with the management of change that the level attribute has been removed. I know that this is going to create some difficulties within some companies who need it to indicate to the end user what has changed between issues of the publication (IETP or Hardcopy) where the Data Module has been subjected to several different issues between publications. This is particularly relevant and important where a Data Module originator is supplying essentially the same Data Module to several different clients. The original mechanism is so simple that if it is used properly issue tracking is guaranteed in a properly constructed delivery application.

Other things

I have no doubt that there will be a number of other significant changes come to light in the course of time as I, and others, start using Issue 4.

Something from Issue 3

While using Issue 3 the other day to write some testing procedures I discovered that their was a subtle change in the way that S1000D handled Sheets in the display of Figures. It seems that the XML prevents you from having something as simple as Sheet 1 of 2. The schema forces you to have two digits in both the sheet and sheetno attributes. I mentioned this a couple of days ago when I visited one of our clients and they were not too happy with the way it looks. Oh well we are stuck with Sheet 01 of 02 I suppose!

Budapest

I have recently received three emails letting me know that you can save money by booking now for the Budapest shared conference (ATA and S1000D). The link that was provided is http://www.ataebiz.org/forum

I will not be attending but I know that at least one person from my company will be there.