RE: need help explaining one data structure over anoth

Well it depends on how the index is actually being written. 
DocBook has a fairly long history of being very specific 
about a lot of things (think of sect1-5, or all the 
various *info elements). 

If your authors are literally writing up the index inside
<index><indexentry><primary></></></> and so on, the 
different names make it easier to keep straight where
you are as you're writing. I'm sure people who like the 
<item> structure will say that simple indentation works 
fine for this, but it is one thing to think about. The 
writers are your users, so unless there's some other impact 
(like performance), making their job easier ought to 
count for something. So maybe you should ask them and go 
with what they like?

I have implemented the DocBook indexing and found it 
good for some things and awkward for others. What 
you end up with are templates that match primary, secondary, 
etc. rather than a couple of templates, one to match item 
and one to recurse through the hierarchy. At least from 
my perspective, this was a very small issue (read a drop 
in the bucket) in getting the index to be generated and 
properly linked. 

Sara Mitchell
[snipped]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew L. Avizinis [mailto:mla@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 7:47 AM
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE:  need help explaining one data structure 
> over another
> 
> 
> I guess I am just trying to figure out why DocBook went to 
> such trouble to
> have a whole bunch of index terms -- they must have had some 
> reason for
> using primary, secondary, indexdiv, etc., right?


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