Hi Eliot -
One complaint that several reviewers submitted was that the
contains/contained by was not accurate, depending on whether they were
looking at a topic in the ditabase context or in one of the other main
topic types. The comment was most often received about the topic types,
though it also applies to body elements (section can be in body, conbody,
or refbody when inside ditabase, but only in one of those when in the OASIS
reference type).
For the current draft of the language reference, I put in the ditabase
content model. I considered putting in all of the models: "When in an OASIS
Ditabase, you will see this. When in an OASIS topic or concept, you will
see this." However, that would really blow up the size of the reference.
So, I put in the wording you will see in many places about the model
differing slightly. Even that is not great, because as you point out the
statement is only accurate with regards to the OASIS doctypes. That is
really the best we can do though, if we are going to list the
contains/contained by at all.
Do you (or anybody else) have any better wording for the glossentry
element, or for the common text that appears with elements like ? For
glossary, I could change the text to something like this:
In the OASIS Composite document type, the glossentry element can be
contained by other topic types (topic, concept, task, reference), and by
the dita element.
In the OASIS glossentry topic type, the glossentry element cannot be
contained by any other element.
Like other topic types, this model may differ when the glossary module is
used in new document types.
Related to this and to your other note - one open item from Jeff Ogden's
original review of the language reference is to use the same wording
everywhere for composite, ditabase, and the other terms that are used for
the