Re: [dita] Question about keyref and replacement text

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@contrext.com>]

I think highlighting linktext as best practice is reasonable.

Cheers,

E.
—————
Eliot Kimber, Owner
Contrext, LLC
http://contrext.com




On 9/22/14, 10:24 AM, "Robert D Anderson" <robander@us.ibm.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>As mentioned last week, I've finally completed the initial rewrite of the
>DITA spec topics on processing keys. Some of the changes are just
>clarifications of existing language, and some comes from TC meetings a
>year or two ago when I came back after my first attempt to do the rewrite.
>
>It's clear to anybody who has looked at the topic that we have some
>complicated rules for pulling in text when using @keyref. If you're a
>keyword with @keyref, you can get it from one place. If you're a term,
>from another. Of course, ph and xref could come from a third. This means
>that if you are very careful, and your processor rigorously supports all
>of these rules, you could define one key that pulls in one set of text
>for most (maybe not all) keywords, one set for term, one set for most
>other elements, etc. While it's possible people make use of this, I'm
>guessing few if any do so intentionally or reliably. We don't give any
>examples of this very complicated scenario.
>
>The 1.2 spec also states that when you don't have this complicated setup,
>any key reference that pulls text will eventually fall back to looking in
><linktext>. This is actually what we use in our examples of resolving
>text for <keyword>. I read this and think - if I want all my references
>to a given key to get the same text, the best practice is to store that
>text inside the <linktext> element.
>
>We can't get rid of the more complex rules (yet) in DITA 1.3, because we
>have to stay backwards compatible. However - how would the TC feel about
>highlighting the linktext approach as either a best practice for key
>text, or at least as a way ensure that all of your link text is the same
>across all uses of a single key?
>
>Thanks -
>
>Robert D Anderson
>IBM Authoring Tools Development
>Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)