OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

dita message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: Re: [dita] conditional processing - inheritance case


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



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

04/20/2006 06:47 PM

To
Michael Priestley/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA, <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc

Subject
RE: [dita] conditional processing -  inheritance case







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



[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]