further on the ref's / ID on Ph

["Jan Benedictus" <jan.benedictus@fontoxml.com>]

Hi all,

Thanks for the responses to our questions regarding the referencing. 
Maybe just to sketch what we try to achieve:

The idea is that a text contains important entities inline in the text, such as <company>, <product>, <brand>, <category>. 

However, we want to do this in two variants: 
- mark text as it is, but give it a reference to an un-ambiguous definition of that entity 
- include external text (while of course maintaining that reference to an un-ambiguous definition of that entity)

We expect that the reference can be stored within, or outside the DITA collection. We can also envisage that text that is included, comes from DITA topics, or directly from databases or alike.


We have evaluated <ph> and <xref> to specialise from. Xref has limitations (not in title, not in desc), so <ph> certainly has preference.


Michael proposed the key-ref mechanism, but I am not sure if that will cover all use-cases. Furthermore, like Mark confirmed, we seem to miss ID s on <ph>, so that we cannot conref <ph>.


For the sake of making progress, we have now used conref, and we added ID to phrase, but if there are better ways to do this, we are of course happy to adjust!


Please let's discuss your ideas later today or via the list.

cheers!

Jan