Re: [dita] DITA namespace?

["Eliot Kimber" <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> A couple of thoughts. The current DITA attribute is not very helpful 
> because it does not consistently appear on the root element of a DITA 
> document (even after attribute expansion).
>  
> In addition, it breaks MSXML and Internet Explorer.
>  
> " Use of default namespace declaration attribute in DTD not supported. 
> Error processing resource "

This is a red herring because the DITAArchVersion attribute does not 
enable *direct* association of a schema with any particular element of a 
DITA document nor was it intended to. That is, the namespace governs 
only the attribute, not the element that exhibits the attribute and 
therefore is not *directly* useful for associating a schema with the 
document as a whole.

However, the DITAArchVersion attribute *is* sufficient to enable 
unambiguous recognition of documents as being DITA documents (because 
they have this attribute in this namespace). This is in turn sufficient 
to enable applications to associate the DITA document type with DITA 
documents, however it is that they do that (i.e., by looking up the 
applicable schema in some tool-specific mapping of clues to schemas or 
by applying some tool-specific schema association algorithm).

So even if Microsoft's tools could process the defaulted attribute, it 
wouldn't help them because their mechanism for binding schemas to 
documents is too simplistic. (And inexplicably so, given that they 
require you to register schemas and provide information that allows them 
to be associated with documents. They could easily do something like 
provide the option of using an arbitrary XSLT match statement to do 
recognition, rather than relying solely on the root element's namespace.)

So the only solution to make MS Word usable as a DITA authoring tool is 
to provide one or more namespaces governed by XSD schemas. Given that MS 
Word isn't really useful as an XML authoring tool (at least not without 
a huge amount of customization effort), I'm not sure that this, alone, 
is sufficient to compel the definition of DITA namespaces and schemas in 
the short term.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
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ekimber@innodata-isogen.com
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