OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC

I just noticed that the navref element, which is used to link from one 
map to another map, uses "mapref" rather than "href" (e.g., as used on 
topicref).

It seems to me that we should be consistent in either using href= for 
all addresses (my preference) or consistent is having the name of the 
referencing attribute indicate the nominal type of the target.

Of course, by the same token, "navref" is not a very good name for the 
element, which should probably be "mapref" (to be parallel with 
topicref, for example).

Too late to address this in 1.1 but we should log it for post 1.1.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
8500 N. Mopac, Suite 402
Austin, TX 78759
(214) 954-5198

ekimber@innodata-isogen.com
www.innodata-isogen.com

"W. Eliot Kimber" <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>
wrote on 2007-01-23 06.17.52:

> It seems to me that we should be consistent in either using href=
for

> all addresses (my preference) or consistent is having the name of
the

> referencing attribute indicate the nominal type of the target.


DITA 2.0 will, I presume, be namespace-aware.
 

Whatever we decide should probably be done in conjunction with the XLink
namespace (http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/).  An extensible standard like
DITA needs a way for any specialization to unequivocally state that such-and-such
an attribute is a hyperlink.  Otherwise any tool that works with DITA
documents may accidenally munge hyperlinks when, say, moving a resource.
 Anyone who has looked through the DITA-OT gen-list target Java code
will see how precarious it can be to scan for hyperlinks.

Standards of comparable or greater maturity (such
as SVG) use XLink; they might be worth looking at for inspiration.

--

Deborah Pickett

Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com