Question about the "passthrough" specified for attributes in DITAVAL

[Radu Coravu <radu_coravu@sync.ro>]

Hi,

This question is based on the following DITA Users List discussion:

> https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dita-users/conversations/topics/35727

As a recap:

Sometimes it would be interesting that if you mark a certain DITA 
element with a profiling attribute like:

> <p audience="novice">

that attribute would become part of the XHTML output allowing users to 
use Javascript and CSS to dynamically change the page based on the 
user's role for example.

Michael Priestley suggested that if in the DITAVAL filter file you would 
use something like this:

> <val>
>     <prop action="passthrough" att="audience"/>
> </val>

this could be accomplished.

I'm not sure how to interpret the "action='passthrough'" based on the 
specification:

> http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/langref/ditaval-prop.html#ditaval-prop

Should the attribute be preserved and then transferred to the output 
format as possibly an XHTML "data-" attribute or should it be just 
preserved in the processing stages before the output is constructed?

As far as I remember we received from several users in the past 
questions about this usecase of somehow passing profiling attributes 
from DITA to the XHTML output in order to dynamically change the page 
based on user role.

Regards,
Radu

Radu Coravu
<oXygen/>  XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com