Best practice for prolog specialization

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

Several users have reported issues with prolog specialization.  They are
trying to implement community-specific versions of a prolog due to the
prolog containing custom changes to element names.  Among DITA elements,
prolog and its contents are a bit problematic because there are many cases
of only 1 instance of particular elements (prolog itself being one),
meaning that domain specialization would introduce a "use one or the other"
rule for either the new element or its clone.

One suggested approach is to specialize an intermediate common topic, from
which the descendent infotypes would inherit the specific prolog (avoiding
the need to use domain specialization for single-instance elements like
prolog).

Another suggestion has been "replacement domains" as a design point. These
are ostensibly related to items 46 and 29 in our 1.1 requirements list.

There is already activity on this issue, so I sense it is urgent for those
users to get some tactical advice while waiting for the issue to go through
due course for 1.1 evaluation and resolution.

Regards,
--
Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
11501 Burnet Rd., MS 9037D018, Austin TX 78758
Ph. 512-838-8550   (T/L 678-8550)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
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