Yas, you are on record as favoring the attribute proposal for
implementation purposes. I'm wondering why the existing proposal is hard
to implement. They are all XML, after all, so internally you would just
reduce them to some ID.
And
Both reduce to (inventing my own pseudo-code):
index-range-start(foo:bar)
The test would be to make sure index-range-end(foo:bar) also exists. Why
is one syntax harder than the other? The FO plugin for the DITA Open
Toolkit already detects mismatched index page ranges today.
The other issue that both you and Paul G are eminently qualified to
address is the usability issue. The proposed change to index ranges is
essentially a switch from element/content-based authoring to an
element/@attribute approach. You essentially require that the author
come up with an ID to assign to an attribute. Existing XML authoring
tools simply don't make attribute editing/viewing easy. Everything I've
heard about user friendly XML authoring says to avoid authoring
attributes (which are usually invisible), let alone coming up with IDs
for those invisible attributes, let alone authoring matching pairs of
those invented IDs for those invisible attributes. Won't this approach
be unacceptably unfriendly to your users?
Chris