I was lurking for some of the meeting - but must
have missed something germane to this discussion.
So you're thinking of extending specialization to all conditional
attributes - not just props?
Michael Priestley wrote:
If "webusertype" directly
specialized props, then the audience logic for the corporate website
would
not recognize it as a kind of audience, and would ignore the values in
it. Effectively, the corporate web site logic would have to be modified
when a business unit or product specialized one of the attributes it
uses,
instead of automatically recognizing the specialized attribute as one
it
supports.
This is reasonably parallel to what
would happen if, say, there was a company-wide behavior for a phrase
tag
eg <productname>, that was specialized by some parts of the
company
to be more specific, eg <serverpackage> vs.
<softwarepackage>.
Without specialization, every new tag needs new behavior; with
specialization,
fall-through processing can be applied where it exists/is appropriate.
Michael Priestley
IBM DITA Architect and Classification Schema PDT Lead
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
I appreciate your effort in
working
this through. I don't totally understand, however. Could you please
outline
what in this scenario would work differently if the "webusertype"
and "jobrole" attributes directly specialized "props"?
From: Michael Priestley
[mailto:mpriestl@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 3:15 PM
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] conditional processing - inheritance case
Per a discussion today with Paul Prescod, Erik Hennum, Bruce Esrig, and
Eliot Kimber, here's my attempt at describing a scenario which involves
more than one level of specialization and takes advantage of inherited
processing (ie in which the semantic relationship to the ancestor
elements
matter). The scenario is entirely made up and not intended to be
descriptive
of any real company processes, but hopefully still plausible enough to
develop an understanding of how the type hierarchy might be useful in
the
audience case.
- a company website has content delivered from various business units
within
it
- all content is processed according to audience, and some content is
hidden,
revealed, or flagged according to:
- guest user
- registered user
- business partner
- supplier
- customer
- company employee
- contractor working for the company
- for a lot of the content, this is enough, but some business units
have
chosen to specialize audience to provide additional kinds of
personalization
based on job role (manager, programmer, administrator, etc.);
experience
level (expert user, novice user, etc.;); or educational background
(highschool;
college/university; masters/phd, etc.); or other purpose. Typically
they
don't want to store the guest/registered etc. info in the base audience
attribute since it becomes confusing for authors. So instead these
business
units specialize audience to provide a "webusertype" attribute.
- when displaying content, the company website checks the content
attributes
against the current user:
- if the "audience" attribute evaluates to exclude, the
content is excluded
- if any specializations of audience evaluate to exclude, the content
is excluded.
For example:
- current user is a registered guest, a business partner, and a supplier
- so we exclude content targetting guests (like invitations to
register),
customers (like special promotions), or employees
So the following paragraphs are excluded:
<p audience="guest customer">This applies to guest users
or to customers</p>
<p webusertype="employee contractor" jobrole="consultant">This
applies to employees or contractors who are consultants</p>
The logic would be, as discussed in the phone call, that:
- a ditaval action can target a particular attribute, or an attribute
and
its children
- when targetting an attribute and its children, the distinction
between
attributes is still preserved - only one of the child attributes needs
to evaluate to exclude for the whole element to be excluded, like
webusertype
in the example above
Hoping this scenario makes sense. The previous two scenarios I posted
for
preservation of values during generalization to a particular DTD level
could also provide some justification for multi-level specialization.
For
example, the specialization-unaware tool in the other scenarios might
still
be aware of the first three levels of specializations in a company (on
a per-DTD basis), and only require generalization for specializations
that
go beyond three levels. In that case, you would not want to generalize
all the way to the top and lose attributes unnecessarily - you would
want
to preserve the attributes you can for whichever specializations the
tool
supports, and only generalize when the DTD/Schema is unknown to the
tool.
Michael Priestley
IBM DITA Architect and Classification Schema PDT Lead
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
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