Repeated conrefs

Sorry for all of the emails. These are various questions that have been in the back of my mind for a very long time and I would like to see them addressed in the 1.1. spec.

According to the spec: “A valid conref processor does not allow the resolution of a reuse relationship that could be rendered invalid under the rules of either the reused or reusing content.”

By definition, every element that is conrefed has an “id” attribute. Is it therefore invalid to conref the same element into the same topic twice? And to conref the same topic into a parent topic twice?

Is it legal for an element with a DITA conref to reference another element with a conref? If so, shouldn’t DITA disallow mutually recursive conrefs?

And as an implementation question: how many validating conref processors are known to exist and to support DITA semantics (including specialization, ID, filtering) explicitly?

Paul Prescod

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