Included below are notes from the conference
call several of us had back on 24 September to talk about processor supplied
defaults and cascading values. The call was initiated by Michael to address a
question that was originally asked by Robert. Robert’s original note to
the DITA TC list on 9 September is included below.
I should have sent these notes to the DITA
TC earlier.
Please send any comments, corrections, or
questions to me, to the six of us who were on the call, or to the DITA TC
e-mail list. If necessary we can talk about this on a future DITA TC call, but
at least right now I am assuming that that isn’t necessary and this will
all be reviewed again when it is written up and included in the DITA 1.2
Architectural Specification.
-Jeff
From: Ogden, Jeff
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008
3:06 PM
To: Helfinstine, David; 'Robert D Anderson';
'Michael Priestley'; 'Bruce Nevin (bnevin)'; 'Erik Hennum'
Subject: RE: notes from
yesterday's call about controlled value defaults and other related things
No responses to this note. Can I
assume that what I wrote is perfect? If that isn’t the case, please
let me know.
-Jeff
From: Ogden, Jeff
Sent: Wednesday, September 24,
2008 3:53 PM
To: Helfinstine, David; 'Robert D
Anderson'; 'Michael Priestley'; 'Bruce Nevin (bnevin)'; 'Erik Hennum'
Subject: notes from yesterday's call
about controlled value defaults and other rrelated things
This isn’t the
description that I agreed to write at the end of yesterday’s call. I
still plan to produce the description, but I wanted to get some notes written
down soon before I forgot what we talked about and agreed to on
yesterday’s call. Let me know if any of my understandings are off base.
The main thing we agreed
to yesterday is that within a document the order in which effective attribute
values are determined is:
1.
Explicit values
2.
DTD or XML schema defaults
3. Cascades
within the document (override or combined)
4.
Cascades from a higher level doc to this doc
a.
maps to maps or maps to topics,
b.
override or combined,
c. includes
cascading of values within this doc when appropriate
5. Controlled
value defaults applied within the document
6. Other
processor supplied defaults.
Before attributes values
cascade from a higher level doc to a lower level doc (step #4), the attribute
values within the higher level doc are determined using the same 6 steps. The
source of the attribute value in the higher level document never matters when
values cascade into lower level documents.
More notes edited into
the text below.
-Jeff
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