RE: [dita] Groups - DITA Proposed Feature #12013 Referencing a range of elements (conrefrange.html) uploaded

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: yas.etessam@justsystems.com 
> 
> Document Description:
> HTML version of DITA Proposed Feature #12013 Referencing a range of
> elements
> 
> Download Document:  
>
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/25393/con
refrange.html


I still have reservations about this proposal in general,
but I think the singleton approach makes it more palatable.

The singleton approach seems to have fewer problems,
and I see no advantage to the paired approach.  In
particular, I think recursive conreffing with the 
paired design is problematic--I wouldn't want it to
work as described in the current proposal where it
sounds like a start conref can/must point to a start 
conref, etc.  (There is no reason the beginning or
end--or any of the intermediate siblings--of the 
referenced range couldn't be a pointwise conref.)

With the singleton approach, I think we would have an
easier time addressing various possible error cases.
We might just be able to say something like "if the
conrefend attribute's target is not found on a
'following sibling' (in the XPath sense) of the
conref attribute's target, that conrefend attribute
is ignored (with or without an error message), and 
the conref is treated as a usual (pointwise) conref"
and have that cover all error cases.

With the singleton approach, I suggest we continue with
"the first element in the source must be the same 
type as the start element of the target range" and
the rest of the usual conref validation, but we don't
do any such validation for the target of the conrefend.

paul