Re: [dita-comment] resourceid/@id has wrong data type?

[Robert D Anderson <robander@us.ibm.com>]

Hi Eero,

I'll actually take the general case first, and then the <resourceid> case, because it's an odd one.

For most elements in DITA, there is no requirement for uniqueness, which is why we can't use the ID data type. For example, it is legal (and expected) to have a structure with nested topics, and each ID inside a topic must only be unique within the body of that topic - so you can have two topics in one document that both contain a table with id="table". Those would be referenced with the usual DITA syntax of #topic1/table and #topic2/table. They can't be defined as type ID, because that carries along the rule that the ID must be unique within the entire document.

The topics themselves are an exception - it is not legal to duplicate topic IDs within a single document, and they are defined with type ID.

Map elements are an odd case where the IDs are supposed to be unique, but they were originally defined with type CDATA and we can't make that more strict without breaking our backwards compatibility rule. It probably wouldn't help much anyway, since so many of those elements are shared with topics so are defined with type CDATA.

The <resourceid> element is an odd one where the ID attribute was given an entirely different definition, based on giving some other application's ID for this topic; in that case, there is not even a requirement to know in advance what characters are legal. That is changing in DITA 1.3, where that usage of resourceid/@id is deprecated in favor of the new @appid attribute; with DITA 1.3, authors are able to use @id here in the same way they use / validate @id everywhere.

Thanks -

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)

Eero Helenius ---04/09/2014 05:46:13---Hello all, I noticed today that as of DITA 1.2, the data type of the @id attribute of the <resourcei

From: Eero Helenius <eero.helenius@kapsi.fi>
To: dita-comment@lists.oasis-open.org,
Date: 04/09/2014 05:46
Subject: [dita-comment] resourceid/@id has wrong data type?

---

Hello all,

I noticed today that as of DITA 1.2, the data type of the @id attribute of the <resourceid> element is CDATA[1].

I wonder whether this is this intentional? It would make more sense to me if the data type was ID instead, as with all (?) other @id attributes in DITA. That way any possible invalid characters in the @id attribute could be detected when validating the DITA file.

(Apologies if this has already been brought up before; I couldn’t find anything with Google or by searching the mailing list archives.)

[1]  http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/langref/resourceid.html

Best regards,

--
Eero Helenius
eero.helenius@kapsi.fi
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