Version numbers for public IDs for non-shell DTD components

["Chris Wong" <cwong@idiominc.com>]

I'm sure we must have covered this before, but I just reviewed the catalog.xml in the DITA 1.1 draft and and was surprised to find that many public IDs don't have the version number embedded in it. This is a problem for any implementation that needs to support different DITA versions. The catalog approach would have addressed this elegantly. For example, the entries for the shell DTDs direct the parser to the appropriate DTD version based on the public ID in the DOCTYPE declaration:

 

    <public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DITA 1.1 Topic//EN" uri="dtd_1.1/topic.dtd"/>
    <public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DITA 1.0 Topic//EN" uri="dtd_1.0/topic.dtd"/>

 

But the shell DTDs in turn load their *.ent and *.mod components, and those have unversioned public IDs:

 

    <public publicId="-//OASIS//ELEMENTS DITA Topic//EN" uri="dtd_1.1/topic.mod"/>

So a document with a DOCTYPE pointing to DITA 1.0's topic.dtd would load dtd_1.0/topic.dtd, but will load topic.mod from dtd_1.1/, simply because topic.dtd does not ask for a specific version of topic.mod and gets whatever the catalog provides. Am I missing something?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris