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Subject: Re: [dita] Proposed Issue: Namespaces for domains and topic types
- From: Erik Hennum <ehennum@us.ibm.com>
- To: "Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@blastradius.com>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 07:04:41 -0700
Hi, Paul:
When TC members have talked about namespaces in the past, there was general recognition that the DITA module qualifiers serve a purpose (identification of a unit of vocabulary and prevention of ambiguity) that's in the standard problem domain for namespaces.
The issues that haven't seemed to have a good solution in the past include
- Concern about introducing cognitive noise into content by requiring a namespace prefix on instances where the element name is already unique within the document.
- Concern about streamlined XSLT rules for matching verbose class attribute declarations.
That said, it is probably time to revisit namespaces to see if we have better ideas.
Thanks,
Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com
"Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@blastradius.com>
"Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@blastradius.com>
08/30/2005 02:44 AM
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DITA domains names and topic types currently form a flat namespace of short words (let’s call them “topic names” as a short form). Topic names are not grounded in any namespace (e.g. DNS, ISBN) that is managed on a large scale. Without this grounding, one of two situations is inevitable:
1. The DITA community will somehow centralize the assignment of topic names – resulting in overhead every time anyone wishes to specialize DITA.
2. Topic types will clash with other topic types, causing problems for processing triggered off of topic type name (e.g. XSLT processing, metadata extraction)
Neither of these situations seem acceptable. Therefore, I propose that DITA topic types and domain names be somehow connected to an externally managed namespace such as DNS or ISBN. There are many syntactic ways that this could be achieved. For example, class attributes could be constructed like this:
class=”- org.oasis.DITA/topic com.ibm.apidoc/apidoc com.blastradius/DOMAPI “
Or namespaces could express a mapping from domain names to URLs:
<foo xmlns:topic=”http://.../” xmlns:blastradius=”http://”>
<mytopic class=”topic/topic blastradius/mytopic”>
…
</mytopic>
</foo>
There are other syntaxes possible.
Paul Prescod
Blast Radius XMetaL
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