Navref and optional features

["W. Eliot Kimber" <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>]

The description of navref says:

"It may not be supported for all output formats."

This is the only occurrence I could find of the text "not supported".

Normally this would be expressed by saying that navref is an optional 
feature of DITA, as a signal to implementors that they don't have to 
implement it and can still claim a conforming implementation.

However, I think the intent of this statement is that navref *is not 
meaningful" for some output types.

I think we need to remove this statement and simply clarify the 
semantics of navref (pre my previous post) such that it has a meaningful 
(possibly no-op) behavior in all possible rendition contexts.

In particular, we need to make it clear that DITA-aware data management 
systems that manage knowledge of DITA-defined links *must support* 
navref just as they must support topicref or conref or xref.

At the moment the implication of the specification is that there are no 
optional features of DITA. We need to make sure that the above statement 
is not misconstrued as making navref an optional feature.

Cheers,

Eliot

-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
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ekimber@innodata-isogen.com
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