Re: [dita-comment] Possible problem in DITA 1.3 DTDs

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

Hi Radu,

Thanks for the comment.

This is a generally unavoidable side effect that comes from the design for <ditavalref>, <mapref>, and DITA domains in general.

The <ditavalref> element is a domain specialization of <topicref>, which means that for any doctype that includes the domain, <ditavalref> can appear in any location that allows <topicref>. This comes from the design for DITA domains in general.

The <mapref> element is a convenience element that is really just a shortcut for referencing a map without having to specify the @format attribute. The specification itself is not clear on the meaning of topics referenced inside of a map reference, but it has generally been viewed as unwise or at least undefined. Because of that, when <mapref> was defined in DITA 1.2, it did not allow any child <topicref> elements. Allowing those would seem to encourage the undefined practice of adding topic references inside of map references.

As a result, because <mapref> does not allow <topicref>, it also does not allow domain specializations of <topicref> (including <ditavalref>). This is related to a comment that came in during the public review, noting that <ditavalref> cannot be used as the direct child of a bookmap; the issue is the same, in that bookmap does not directly allow <topicref>. The only way we could really get around this, without significantly opening up <mapref> or <bookmap>, would be to define <ditavalref> as a new base element rather than as a specialization of <topicref>. That was briefly considered, but had other costs that pushed us into doing <ditavalref> as a domain.

Hope that makes sense -

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

Radu Coravu ---09/02/2015 07:57:51---Hi, The DITA 1.3 DTDs do not seem to allow a <ditavalref> element to appear

From: Radu Coravu <radu_coravu@sync.ro>
To: dita-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Date: 09/02/2015 07:57
Subject: [dita-comment] Possible problem in DITA 1.3 DTDs

---

Hi,

The DITA 1.3 DTDs do not seem to allow a <ditavalref> element to appear 
inside a <mapref>. So this is flagged as invalid:

>   <mapref href="">>     <ditavalref href="">>   </mapref>

and I need to use <topicref> with format="ditamap" to bypass this.

Regards,
Radu

Radu Coravu
<oXygen/>  XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com

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