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Subject: Public Comment


Comment from: ehennum@us.ibm.com

Linking to a Context

Yet another really interesting issue...

Eliot Kimber <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com> wrote on 06/01/2004 01:49:33 PM:
> > 4. There is a fundamental problem with links and re-use, which is that a
> > link to an element may need to indicate what use context the target is
> > intended to be resolved in terms of.
>
> ...
>
> We might call issue 4 the "link target rendition context ambiguity"
> issue. That is, in some circumstances it can be ambiguous what the
> *rendition* context of a particular link target is or should be. This is
> entirely a side effect of going from a modular authoring data set (e.g.,
> DITA topics related by maps and other links) to a monolithic delivery
> form that is not modular, such as creating single PDF "books" from a set
> of topics.

Unfortunately, as Robert Anderson pointed out to me, we can't use another topic to specify unambiguous context.  The contextualizing topic might itself appear in multiple positions.

To refer to a topic in a specific context, would it be straightforward to refer to the topicref that represents the context in the map?  That is, would it make sense to assign an id to the topicref and to make a topicref to the id of that topicref?  As in:

<map id="map1">
    <topicref id="context1" href="myTopic.xml"/>
    ...
    <topicref id="context2" href="myTopic.xml"/>
    ...
    <reltable>
        <relrow>
            <relcell>
                <topicref href="otherTopic1.xml"/>
            </relcell>
            <relcell>
                <topicref href="#map1/context1"/>
            </relcell>
        </relrow>
        <relrow>
            <relcell>
                <topicref href="otherTopic2.xml"/>
            </relcell>
            <relcell>
                <topicref href="#map1/context2"/>
            </relcell>
        </relrow>
    </reltable>
</map>

So that otherTopic1.xml and myTopic.xml would be related in context1 and otherTopic2.xml and myTopic.xml would be related to in context2?

It would make sense for processing to resolve the href to the topic rather than the map position because the destination of a link can't be a context only. That is, when the user followed the related link, the user would go to the topic in the specified context.

Likely this issue could sensibly be deferred until after DITA 1.0



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