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Subject: Re: [dita] DITA Proposed Feature: Extensibility of DITA through newattributes


I'm going to have to miss the next meeting or two as well, and would also like to voice my support for this proposal, in either its basic or advanced form.

--Dana

JoAnn Hackos wrote:
In my opinion, Paul has stated this requirement very well. I would like to see the more complex version implemented based on my reading of his argument.
 
Since I'm on my way to Australia for two weeks and will miss the next few meetings, I wanted to go on recording supporting this concept.
 

JoAnn

JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD
President
Comtech Services, Inc.
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400
Denver, CO 80215
303-232-7586
joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com
http://www.comtech-serv.com



From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul.prescod@blastradius.com]
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2005 12:51 AM
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] DITA Proposed Feature: Extensibility of DITA through new attributes

This proposal does not yet have an issue number because we have not yet decided to pursue this issue. Please read the proposal with an eye toward discussing that at a TC meeting (or in email).

There are also some design choices described herin.

DITA Proposed Feature # XX

Extensibility of DITA through new attributes

Longer description

XML's two extensibility mechanisms are elements and attributes. As its name implies, extensibility is one of XML's key design criteria. Extensbiility (through specialization and customization) is also a key part of DITA's design. But DITA only allows the definition of new elements, not new attributes, through specialization. There are a variety of reasons that people might wish to add their own attributes (discussed in the Use Case section).

Scope

Trivial, if attribute extension is deemed to be orthogonal to specialization. Potentially major if the two features need to be integrated.

Use Case

  1. Consider a CMS which needs to add attributes to an element to track its object identifier within the CMS. Other processes based upon standard APIs and stylesheet languages can safely ignore the attribute. But the CMS may really need it.
  2. Consider a specialization for software documentation. For internal purposes, it may be important to link each feature description to the internal specification document so that changes in the specification can be reflected in the documentation. To make this work, each element should also have a date change attribute.
  3. Consider a specialization for a product catalog. It might need to refer to company-internal product numbers in order to synchronize with a product database.

DITA itself does not prevent organizations from customizing it with extra attributes of this sort. In fact, it cannot prevent this. These sorts of customizations already exist. What the specification can do is license or proscribe it. If it allows it then attribute-bearing documents will work seamlessly with DITA-based software. If it proscribes it then DITA-validating programs may give error messages about otherwise-harmless attributes.

The following use cases are not addressed by this feature:

  1. Specializations of existing DITA attributes (e.g. @otherprops, @conref, @href etc.).
  2. Specializing attributes as elements or vice versa.

Technical Requirements

The most basic proposal is that the DITA spec simply state that document types of DITA may add attributes to specialized elements and base DITA elements. This would require no change to any existing documents or applications. It would imply no additional work on behalf of DITA implementors. The downside of this proposal is that it would imply that attributes added in this way would be lost during the generalization process. The writer does not know of any applications that would be harmed by this situation.

If DITA's design has a hard requirement that the generalization process be lossless then that would imply that some form of attribute specialization is required. This advanced proposal would most likely take the shape of allowing attributes to specialize elements.

Costs

In the basic form the costs are minimal. In the more complicated form, we would need to agree on a specialization mechanism and implement it in the DITA toolkit and all generalization/specialization implementations.

Benefits

I believe that most large organizational implementations of DITA will want to add attributes, if only to use DITA in content management systems that require it. In fact, they will add attributes, whether the DITA specification allows it or not (as organizations do with Docbook, AECMA and other standard DTDs). If the DITA specification disallows this, and DITA software enforces this policy then organizations will have to write programs to strip these attributes before sharing these documents with their business partners.

Time Required

At the low end (basic proposal), one hour. At the high end (advanced proposal), more than a week of work.

 

 



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