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Subject: Re: [dita] Proposed Issue: Recognizing DITA Documents
Paul Prescod wrote: > That might be enough but I think that we could design something better. The only other mechanism that seems likely would be some sort of PI-based declaration, but the W3C has a firm statement against the use of PIs in XML documents and I think we should respect that. Thus, relying on namespaces is about all there is to work with. You cannot rely on a DOCTYPE declaration (because there probably won't be one) and you can't rely on a schemaLocation= attribute because there doesn't need to be one. In XML, only namespaces provide an unambiguous, reliable way to distinguish the true type of a given element. I specifically requested that all DITA-defined constructs require at least one namespaced attribute in a DITA-defined namespace so that general processors could reliably identify documents as containing DITA-based content. The ditaarch:DITAArchVersion attribute is the result of that request. I could not think of any other way to do it, given the W3C prohibition against PIs. > 1. It's a little bit hard to find for computers because it isn't > reliably on the root element (sometimes it is on a sub-element of the > root element). I don't think this is a compelling objection--it's easy enough to examine an entire document for the namespace declarations within it. It may be tedious but it's not hard. If anybody needs Java code to do this, I can provide it :-) > 2. It's hard to find for humans because it is not in the document > instance but rather in the DTD or Schema. It may or may not be in the document instance. One point of using namespaces for identification is that it allows DTD-less and schema-less documents to be reliably processed. But I agree that this solution doesn't really help humans, but I'm not sure that's that big of an issue, for the simple reason that in most cases either you'll be using a software system which can tell you that it is or is not a DITA document or you simply know that you're in a DITA context. I think it will be the rare person who stumbles upon a bare XML document and needs to know whether or not it is in fact DITA-based and has no tools available to do it. Of course we could easily implement and provide a "DITA recognizer" tool that would serve. Hmmm. > 3. The value seems to reflect the Open Toolkit version rather than > the DITA Specification version. If true, that needs to be fixed. Cheers, Eliot -- W. Eliot Kimber Professional Services Innodata Isogen 9390 Research Blvd, #410 Austin, TX 78759 (512) 372-8155 ekimber@innodata-isogen.com www.innodata-isogen.com
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