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Subject: Re: [dita] [Fwd: Re: DITA @otherprops]
- From: Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>
- To: Dana Spradley <dana.spradley@oracle.com>
- Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 15:04:41 -0400
Re:
>But for me it begs a question: have
we been solliciting and collecting real-world use cases from DITA adopters,
>to make sure the way we're designing
this new feature really does meet their needs?
>
>Or are we just architecting in the dark here?
There maybe a misunderstanding here. I would
guess about a third of the TC consists of real users or represent groups
of real users. I'm in both categories myself.
We've also had relatively detailed discussions
of conditional processing use cases on the dita-users list, which I follow
closely (I recommend you do the same). The scoped attribute value proposal
in particular came out of some of Deborah's use cases, but unfortunately
was deemed out of scope for 1.1 since it hadn't been discussed in detail
on the TC yet.
Michael Priestley
IBM DITA Architect and Classification Schema PDT Lead
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
Dana Spradley <dana.spradley@oracle.com>
04/27/2006 02:43 PM
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oops! forgot to paste in the cc to the group
-------- Original Message --------
I think Deborah already gave us permission in the body of the email, Bruce.
Thanks for the real-world use case, Deborah.
But for me it begs a question: have we been solliciting and collecting
real-world use cases from DITA adopters, to make sure the way we're designing
this new feature really does meet their needs?
Or are we just architecting in the dark here?
--Dana
Esrig, Bruce (Bruce) wrote:
That's really helpful, Deborah,
With your permission, one of us
would be happy to quote you on the list.
Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com
[mailto:Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 9:05 PM
To: robander@us.ibm.com;
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com;
cwong@idiominc.com;
dana.spradley@oracle.com;
esrig@lucent.com
Subject: DITA @otherprops
[Hi, I'm Deborah, and I'm a DITA user. Some of you know me already.
I just wanted to speak up as a data point.]
I've been following the "attribute extensibility" discussion
on the TC mailing list archive and I wanted to butt in on the use, or not,
of @otherprops. We at Moldflow don't use @otherprops primarily because
of fear of commitment. At least the way DITA-OT implements it, it
is only a single axis of extensibility. Example: our product-licence-management
software requires several orthogonal axes: the product name, the operating
system of the client, the operating system of the licence server. In
particular, the latter two can be independent, so it isn't appropriate
to put them both onto one conditional attribute (where they would imply
a union behaviour, and I want intersection behaviour). There might
be another down the track as we implement a second class of licence. Having
only one axis of extensibility in @otherprops doesn't give us any long-term
benefit; in fact, it hinders us because it cements the use of @otherprops
for that role and removes any leeway we might have [thought we had]. Also,
to give @otherprops a specific purpose like this means that we have to
document to authors why such a specific role has such a generic name.
Of course, there are workarounds, and we use them, but most of the content
writers in my company are not technical and are having trouble understanding
exactly what part of the workaround is workaround and what is architectural
necessity.
Our group would, for the record, be quite happy to use a single attribute
for all conditional logic provided that it and the processing model had
explicit support for the conjunctive-normal-form* logic that matches our
business and product model.
This message has sort of rambled off-topic, sorry. But I wanted you
all to know that yes, you do have customers that care about this stuff.
* no, that's not the right term. I mean "conjunction of disjunctions"
(prop1 = (a or b or c) and prop2 = (d or e) and ...), whatever set theory
people call that.
--
Deborah Pickett
Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com
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