Re: [dita] Namespaces and Schemas: Some Initial Findings andXSLTImplications

[Paul Antonov <apg@syntext.com>]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Eliot Kimber wrote:

> Paul Grosso wrote:
>
> > At 18:38 2004-06-28 -0500, Eliot Kimber wrote:
> >
> >
> >> The problem turned out to be that the topic2html.xsl style sheet is
> >> written entirely against the class mappings, which is what it
> >> should do, but because those class mappings are defined in the
> >> schema equivalent of "fixed" attributes, Saxon doesn't see them
> >> because the open source version of Saxon 8 isn't schema aware. Doh!
> >>
> >
> > I don't know any details, but it seems odd that you can't get saxon
> > to work with attribute defaults (I assume it doesn't matter whether
> > they are "fixed" or not).  You might want to shoot an email to
> > Michael Kay <mhk@mhk.me.uk> to see if you're missing something (or to
> > see if he has near term plans to fix this).
>
> The whole issue of defaulted attributes in XML is one of the XML Big
> Lies, namely the assertion that there is no markup minimization in XML.
> There isn't *except* for defaulted attributes. In thinking about it now
> this suggests that there ought to be a simple, schema-compatible, way to
> define attribute defaults that is separate from the larger function of
> defining data types and content constraints so that processors could
> easily implement attribute defaulting without having to step up to full
> schema awareness, but it appears that this idea got lost in schema land
> (not surprisingly). Hmmm.

This is another good reason for having a formal, XML-based format for DITA
specializations. From this, it will be pretty easy to generate XSLT
stylesheet which sets class attributes for further processing (both
steps can be done in a single XSLT processor run because most XSLT
implementations allow apply-templates on result tree fragments).

-- Paul