Working With Sections

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When working with Tópico, it is suggested you organize your topics into sections, each of which should contains a tilte and some normal HTML content. This approach gets rid of the traditional heading approach, which tends to focus more on the division than the containment.

Here are some of the possible advantages of splitting a topic into sections:

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  • Users are already familiar with this standard type of division;
  • This approach focuses on the containment instead of the separation;
  • The XStandard editor makes editing section divs easy enough;
  • You gain a nice and useful level of granularity almost for free;
  • A readable id can be created automatically from a section's title;
  • A top of the page index can be created by an appropriate template.

Working with section is also pretty much in line with the best practices as they're found in HTML 5, XHTML 2 and DITA.

HTML 5

From the HTML 5 current draft:

The section element represents a generic document or application section. A section, in this context, is a thematic grouping of content, typically with a header, possibly with a footer.

Examples of sections would be chapters, the various tabbed pages in a tabbed dialog box, or the numbered sections of a thesis. A Web site's home page could be split into sections for an introduction, news items, contact information.

 

XHTML 2

From the XHTML 2 current draft:

The section element, in conjunction with the h element, offers a mechanism for structuring documents into sections. This element defines content to be block-level but imposes no other presentational idioms on the content, which may otherwise be controlled from a style sheet.

In contrast with HTML 5, XHTML 2 gets rid of the h1 to h6 heading in favor of a more generic h element.

By representing the structure of documents explicitly using the section and h elements gives the author greater control over presentation possibilities than the traditional implicit structuring using numbered levels of headings. For instance, it is then possible to indicate the nesting of sections by causing a border to be displayed to the left of sections.

When working Tópico, you can use the "class" attribute of the "div" or other block elements elements to tag sections and titles.

The following CSS examples has styles for a first and second (nexted) level sections titles.

CSS

div.section p.title {font-weight:bold;}

div.section div.section p.title {font-style:italic;}

In the above stylesheet, the first level title would be bold while the nested title would be italic.

DITA

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture doe not have the concept of numbered headings either and also relies on nested sections (and even nested topics in this case).

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