RE: [dita] referencing a bookmap from a map

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

There seems to me to be something inherently wrong about grouping more
than one bookmap in a map, or grouping bookmaps, maps, and topics
promiscuously together in a map, and that is the source of these
conundrums. (Conundra?) 

<map> is designedly generic, or rather <topicref> is, which can point to
any resource, with the proviso that:

      References to content other than DITA topics should use the 
      format attribute to identify the kind of resource being 
      referenced.			
      [Extracted from DITA 1.1 Language Specification.]

Because you _can_ do it, --_should_ you? Maybe it's proposed for
producing a set of  books or a rack of manuals all at one go, but is
that really necessary? Are you going to render e.g. a single PDF for a
set of books?

Now that <bookmap has been provided, my sense is that it should be
thought of as hierarchically above <map>, and this usage of referencing
<bookmap> from <map> should be prohibited or at least cautioned against,
not least because of the issues you're raising.

But I'm probably missing an important use case here.

	/Bruce



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Grosso, Paul [mailto:pgrosso@ptc.com] 
> Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 12:52 PM
> To: dita
> Subject: RE: [dita] referencing a bookmap from a map
> 
> Don,
> 
> I've not seen any responses to this.  Can you put it on the 
> agenda for our next meeting?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> paul 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Grosso, Paul [mailto:pgrosso@ptc.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, 2009 May 28 10:44
> > To: dita
> > Subject: [dita] referencing a bookmap from a map
> > 
> > 
> > Proposal 12055 is clear about what we do in the specialized map to 
> > generic map case and also about the specialized map to 
> specialized map 
> > case, but we're not sure what should happen when a generic map 
> > references a specialized map.
> > 
> > For example, what should happen in the following case:
> > 
> > map1
> > ----
> > 	topicref to bookmap2
> > 
> > bookmap2
> > --------
> > 	frontmatter
> > 		booklists
> > 			Toc
> > 	part referencing a concept
> > 		chapter referencing a task
> > 
> > What are the contexts or roles for the elements in bookmap2?  
> > Unchanged?
> > Or does the generic topic reference from map1 override the 
> top level 
> > topicrefs in bookmap2 so you end up with something effectively like 
> > the following for bookmap2:
> > 
> > bookmap2
> > --------
> > 	topicref for frontmatter
> > 		booklists
> > 			Toc
> > 	topicref for part referencing a concept
> > 		chapter referencing a task
> > 
> > 
> > Keeping things unchanged preserves the specialized 
> information from a 
> > bookmap, but it also allows you to create situations using map 
> > references that you could not create within a single 
> bookmap (e.g., a 
> > chapter within a chapter or a part within a topic).
> > 
> > On the other hand, if the generic topic reference from map1 
> overrides 
> > the top level topicrefs in bookmap2, you couldn't create unexpected 
> > situations, but you lose all of the specialized information from a 
> > bookmap because you more or less fallback to the lower common 
> > denominator of a generic map.
> > 
> > 
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