Fw: [dita] Proposal for DITA namespaces

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

"Paul Grosso" <pgrosso@arbortext.com> wrote on 08/03/2004 02:04:16 PM:

> Don't people have XSLT that handles DITA now?  I know
> our customers do.
>
> And, while I know DITA XSLT keys in a lot on the values
> in the class attribute, don't DITA XSLT stylesheets ever
> refer to an element or attribute name in any of their
> match or select patterns?
>
> Because, if they do, they will all break when you put a
> namespace on the DITA vocabulary.  An XPath pattern such
> as match="foo" will NOT match the element "foo" if
> foo is in a namespace (even a default namespace).  

For the record, the publicly available XSLT transforms are not completely free of element-oriented match patterns.  This is mostly an oversight that should be corrected rather than a design intent.  Eliot's description of the setup work he did for XIRUSS-T alludes to his having to modify several templates to fix this situation.  Eliot, if you can remember which templates those were, and how you modified them, I'd like to get those updates into the next generic toolkit.

As the owner of the public toolkit, I am comfortable with the thought of restructuring the public toolkit for any modified match pattern global change which our discussions might result in, AT THE TIME that the draft specification itself is actually submitted, so that the reference processing is of course commensurate with the implied values in the standard DTDs/schemas.  Other tool owners may face similar tool migration issues -- AT THE TIME that they elect to switch from pre-OASIS to formal OASIS DITA 1.0.

A related question--several XSLT constructs seem to require literal element names. Could someone confirm whether there are any XSLT elements that cannot operate on specialized match patterns?  I think the cases of literal elements that Eliot found are likely to have used the following XSLT markup:

xsl:number/@count & @from (perhaps an early XSLT engine had problems here)
xsl:value-of/@select (the value seems to be string expressions, not patterns)
xsl:sort/@select (same)
xsl:strip-space/@elements (takes a list of element name tokens, only)
xsl:preserve-space/@elements (same)


Regards,
--
Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
11501 Burnet Rd., MS 9037D018, Austin TX 78758
Ph. 512-838-8550 (T/L 678-8550)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T.S. Eliot