Re: [dita] 1.2 Feature Suggestion: <text> element

[Erik Hennum <ehennum@us.ibm.com>]

Hi, Eliot:

Good design pattern -- probably even be a best practice for DITA 1.1 specializations.

I do wonder whether the applicability of this pattern to many cases means, paradoxically, that we shouldn't introduce a specific element for the individual case. For instance, the pattern also applies to a context of mixed text with blocks (as in <section>, <p>, <entry>, or <itemgroup>).

The other consideration might be that, if we can come up with an acceptable implementation to the constraints proposal, we could apply the constraint to the content model and remove the need to specialize:

http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/14936/Issue34.html

(Assuming we can come up with a constraints implementation that can be detected at runtime to determine interoperability, that packages constraints in reusable modules, that applies constraints to specializations, and that doesn't require an inhumanly complex design pattern for the DTD and XSD implementations.)


Hoping that's interesting,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com

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

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

02/28/2007 08:12 AM

To	<dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc
Subject	[dita] 1.2 Feature Suggestion: <text> element

At least with DITA 1.1, where we can't add attributes, a reasonably 
common pattern is this (using the base types, which would normally be 
specialized for a specific application):

<ph>
   <data/>
   <ph>Text content of the phrase</ph>
</ph>

...

Given the general utility of this pattern, it seems reasonable to 
provide the "text" specialization of "ph" as a base type so specializers 
don't have to repeatedly re-invent it.