Re: [dita] Content reference to fragments

[Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>]

We do say that the two main authoring
units are topics and maps, but perhaps we do need to add something explicit
about disallowing fragments. All addressing in DITA content is scoped by
topic, and in fact it is impossible to create an href that targets a fragment
in DITA syntax, since there would be no topic ID, and the topic ID is a
necessary part of the href to an element. When the topic ID and element
ID are omitted, the target is the first topic in the file. If the file
does not contain a topic, then the target is not a valid DITA target.

We can put additional wording to this
effect in the conref section, and also explicit warnings against fragments
in the high-level definitions for topics and maps. I'm not sure if we need
a full definition of DITA documents per se.

Michael Priestley
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com

"Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@blastradius.com>

03/08/2005 08:26 AM

To	<dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc
Subject	[dita] Content reference to fragments

One of our customers would like to have content references
of the form:

Maintopic.xml:

<!DOCTYPE topic ...>
<topic>
...
<p conref="fragment.xml">...</p>
</topic>

Fragment.xml:

<!DOCTYPE p ...>
<p>A paragraph</p>

Am I correct in my understanding that DITA disallows this? The
architecture reference implies (but does not say) that conrefs must
refer to elements by IDs. The section "Identity Attribute" also
implies
(but does not say) that all DITA information must always reside within
either topics or maps. I would suggest that the architecture
specification have a formal definition of "DITA document" that
either
(preferable, IMO) allows or disallows documents with other root types.
If it allows them then it should be possible to conref them and conref
into them.
----
 Paul Prescod
 Blast Radius XMetaL