RE: [docbook] Adding an audience effectivity attribute

["Rowland, Larry" <larry.rowland@hp.com>]

I agree with your preference.  I think audience works better as the
profiling attribute and that making the message attributes more
specific will be better moving forward.

Larry Rowland 

-----Original Message-----
From: Norman Walsh [mailto:ndw@nwalsh.com] 
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 5:25 AM
To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [docbook] Adding an audience effectivity attribute

Yesterday, the DocBook TC decided to add a new effectivity attribute,
"audience" (Hey, we had seven, let's make it an even eight :-/)
This was partly in response to RFE #1512505.

In implementing this change, I discovered that we already had an
'audience' attribute on the simplemsgentry element. You may recall
that where msgentry has descendants msgaud, msgorig, and msglevel,
simplemsgentry has attributes audience, origin, and level.

There are several possibilities:

1. Ignore the conflict. Decide that audience in either case has
   roughly the same meaning and brush aside the slight semantic
   ambiguities.

2. Choose a different name for the effectivity attribute.

3. Rename the attributes on simplemsgentry: audience->msgaud,
   origin->msgorig, and level->msglevel

I think I prefer 3 (we probably tried to make the names simpler, but
we perhaps should have kept them consistent).

I could live with 2, but if you prefer 2, please suggest a new name.

I think 1 is really not an option. Anyone with existing content that
uses simplemsgentry with an audience attribute (I wonder if there is
any?) is likely to be baffled if the profiling code suddenly elides
content on them.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Always code as if the guy who ends
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | up maintaining your code will be a
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | violent psychopath who knows where
                                   | you live.--M. Golding