RE: [dita] DITA 1.2 suggestion--Inserting a ditamap into a bookmap

["Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com>]

This message of mine ended up not being reflected
in our DITA 1.2 requirements list.

Robert thought Erik's suggestion (12047) covered it.
Then Robert explained [1 and private email] how such 
references should work, but that's not explained in 
the spec (and isn't how the Arbortext folks interpreted 
the spec). 

So there are two potential issues here:

1.  clarifying how this should work in the spec.
2.  adding a mapref element.

The first should be done in DITA 1.1.  We are still 
working things out in off-list email as to how this 
is supposed to work.

The second is a subset of what Erik suggested, but
Erik's 12047 suggestion includes about 5 or 6 things,
and I'm not seeing the need for all the other things
as much as for this, so I don't know how to rate 12047.

I'd rate 12047 high because of the mapref part of the 
suggestion, but low for the rest.

How do we want to handle these two issues?

paul

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200703/msg00043.html

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Grosso, Paul [mailto:pgrosso@ptc.com] 
> Sent: Monday, 2007 March 19 13:41
> To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [dita] DITA 1.2 suggestion--Inserting a ditamap into 
> a bookmap
> 
> This is a DITA 1.2 suggestion to improve how one inserts
> a ditamap reference into a bookmap.
> 
> The problem is that, to reference a ditamap from a bookmap,
> one might have a bookmap that looks like this:
> 
>     <bookmap>
>       <chapter href=somefile.ditamap format=ditamap/>
>     </bookmap>
> 
> However, this can be very misleading since the things in 
> the referenced ditamap file may or may not be chapters.  
> Having to use chapter to reference a ditamap from a
> bookmap is therefore very confusing to users.
> 
> We could allow topicref in bookmap's everywhere chapter and
> part are currently allowed.  That would permit:
> 
>     <bookmap>
>       <topicref href=somefile.ditamap format=ditamap/>
>     </bookmap>
> 
> However, allowing topicref would open to door to references
> to other things besides ditamaps.  
> 
> The preferred solution would be to create something like "mapref"
> as a specialization of topicref with a fixed value for format 
> of "ditamap" and possibly a fixed value for scope of "local".  
> (I'm less sure about scope, but I can't think of a case where it 
> makes sense to have a topicref to a DITA map that isn't available 
> at the time of composition.)  That would allow users to enter:
> 
>     <bookmap>
>       <mapref href=somefile.ditamap/>
>     </bookmap>
> 
> which would be a lot less confusing than the current situation.
>