Public Comment

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Comment from: hedley.finger@myob.com

In the framemaker-dita forum and elsewhere I have expressed how important conditional content is to MYOB, and previously suggested some method of allowing unlimited additional condition attributes and values in the %select-attrs; attributes, instead of trying to cram all additional conditions into otherprops.
After scanning the DITA Language Reference v. 1.0, I cannot see any element that can be applied like <b> or <u> but has no formatting implications. I am thinking of something like the ubiquitous <span> element in HTML.
You need a vanilla, non-formatting inline element like this when you need to apply conditions to a an arbitrary text range within another element such as <p>.  Quite often conditions are applied to alternative forms of expression within a sentence, e.g. one condition refers to a singular situation while another refers to a plural situation, and noun, possessive, and verb forms need to agree.
In fact, a <span> element should be the ancestor of <b>, <u>, <tt>, etc. so it can be specialised to other inline text formatting if necessary in a custom DTD, e.g. <o> = overline.