Question on Public IDs

[Jang <jang@jang.nl>]

Working on improved DITA support in FrameMaker prompts various questions about the reasons for some features present or absent in DITA. Here is one about public IDs.

For all kinds of processing it could be interesting to know which document type (public ID) was opened, but in many cases that information is stripped as it is not part of the XML content. One such case is processing the file with XSLT. If I need to pass the public ID to a result document, I need to pull it from the XML text file and pass it into the XSL as a parameter. This introduces an extra layer of non-XSL code which I would rather not implement.

Various document shells have the same root element (e.g. basetopic and topic, or task, machineryTask and generalTask), so having the root element is not enough to decide. There is the domains attribute, of course, but that is quite complex to handle and may even be different for the same topic type (task with or without certain optional domains included). Specialised topics may use the same root element as their specialisation base but need a different public ID to distinguish them from that base. 

Was there ever an idea of passing the public ID of a document type into an attribute of the root element? If yes, what were the reasons for not doing this and if no, would this be an interesting option for DITA 2.0 ?

Thanks

Jang F.M. Graat
Smart Information Design
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Cell: +31 646 854 996