OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC

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Re: [dita] Proposal for generalized attribute addition

  • 1.  Re: [dita] Proposal for generalized attribute addition

    Posted 08-09-2005 16:56 
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    Subject: Re: [dita] Proposal for generalized attribute addition
    







    



    



After our discussion today, I'm starting to agree
that for 1.1 (and maybe beyond) this enhancement can remain restricted
to filtering attributes - so long as customizers can continue to use
props/otherprops as a grab-bag as well, writing their own serialization
code to run their documents through any uncustomized tools.

    
The types of CDATA attributes I've been describing are very application
specific - often to a legacy application - and as such are perhaps best
dealt with in a DITA customization, not an extension.

    
--Dana
    

    
Chris Wong wrote:
    

    
  
  
  
    I sympathize with your desire not to turn
specialization into a map-anything-to-DITA exercise. But I wonder if
the attributes restriction is appropriate given the freedom DITA
already gives to specializing elements. Specifically, I'm not sure that
the argument for generalization is strong.
    
  
     
    
  
    The way I see it, generalization support is
for supporting legacy processing. Existing transforms that only know
certain elements can process specialized content after generalization.
But with DITA being so new, my question is: is support for legacy
processing useful if there is no legacy processing to support? Any new
DITA-aware code today should be written to look at the class attribute,
not the element name. Generalization would do nothing for them. There
is the danger that this theoretically useful DITA feature may forever
remain theoretically useful. When would it ever become useful?
    
  
     
    
  
    That said, we are where we are, and I would
be wary of dropping or changing a major DITA feature in a 1.1 release.
While people want a more general attribute addition scheme, people also
really, really want this extensible metadata attribute capability. If
adding the former will derail the 1.1 release or drastically delay it,
I would go for the latter just so we can quickly eliminate a major
obstacle to DITA adoption.
    
  
     
    
  
    Chris
    
  
     
    
  

    
                                                
    
					
                                                    

        
                                                
				
    
                                                
    
                                                    
                                                
    
                                                
                                            
    
                                        

                                        
                                        

                                    
			

                                    
                                

                                
                                
    
                                
    
                            
		
                
        
    




            
        
    


	
    


    
    
         
    
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