[oXygen-user] 10.3 DITA Editor Behaviors

[Eliot Kimber]

I'm using DITA 10.3

- The ID generator is nice but it would be nice if it generated much shorter
IDs. It looks like it's generating UUIDs but in most cases it would be
sufficient if the generated ID incorporated the ID of the root topic and a
shorter value, such as a 5-digit serial number. Since IDs for elements other
than topics only need to be unique within their containing parent topic,
there's no need for long or globally-unique IDs (and there shouldn't *ever*
be a need for such IDs, but I realize that some CMS systems impose that
requirement).

- The ID generator does not modify IDs on copy--that means if I create a
topic within a parent topic and then copy it, I get a "duplicate ID"
validation error and have to go manually fix the ID. Copy (as opposed to
move) should act like create and assign a new ID. If Oxygen can't reliably
distinguish move from copy then the current behavior is better than
resetting an existing ID value.

- The behavior of the insert topic ref dialog when you select "append child"
is to continue appending children, so if you keep the dialog open after
doing say "insert topicref to currently-edited file" and don't change the
insertion location, the next topic inserted is inserted as a child of the
one you just inserted, which is almost *never* what I want. In almost every
case that I've inserted a topic and then want to insert more, I'm inserting
children of the initial parent topicref that all exist in the same directory
as the topic I just inserted.

That is, I think it would make more sense for the dialog to *always* revert
to "insert after" behavior even if the origin insertion was an "append
child" insert.

Cheers,

E.
----
Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc.
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