You mean drop the general attribute from the
proposal, and limit the scope to just the props attribute used for
conditional attribute specialization in the hierachical method proposed?
Yes, I could agree to that - provided it included some assurance from
all the other people working on this issue that they have no objection
in principle to the notion of attribute addition Erik's paper suggests,
and would support an attempt to include such an enhancement in 1.2 or
1.3.
I do have another question though: Erik's last message came in with a
gif attachment, and now yours has, filename ATT2282822.gif. I haven't
opened either attachment.
Do you guys have a virus or something?
--Dana
Paul Prescod wrote:
I don't think that we can
promise to put a feature in 1.2 before we've scoped it and judged user
demand for it. But I think that it is very likely that you design such
a feature (which seems quite doable) and find a constituency for it
(which seems quite reasonable) then it could go into 1.2 or 1.3.
Would it be sufficient right now
for us to publically document what the current proposal is NOT for, and
in particular that it is NOT designed for adding arbitrary attributes
to specialized elements? This is a use case that we all agree will not
be handled and is therefore deferred until we have a design and use
cases.
It would be great to sieze a
moment of consensus if such does in fact exist.
I'm sorry, but this really does seem like
low-hanging fruit to me.
What's the point of putting the general attribute in now and support
roundtripping through that, if we could do this instead?
We're not talking about attribute specialization here, but mere
attribute addition.
If we're not doing it now, I'd like to see it in 1.2 - and to see it
done right, I'd like to take the leadership of this enhancement myself.
In return, I would remove my objections to what you're doing with
conditional attribute specialization - since now I can see it in
context as a very targeted solution for a particular kind of universal
attribute, and not as a stalking horse for requiring every added
attribute to submit to some kind of specialization rubric.
--Dana
Erik Hennum wrote:
Hi, Bruce:
About Item 2, I hasten to note that the proposal for extension by
addition for properties is a potential direction rather than something
that's ready for implementation.
For example, we will need to think through the implications of hiding
and restoring additions during roundtripping to the general form and
back to the specialized form. We will want to think through that
problem along with other potential enhancements of the capabilities of
specialization.
I'm confident that, given the minds involved in the DITA Technical
Committee, we will be able to solve those issues, but even I would
agree that they are out of scope for DITA 1.1
My intent with the posting was to suggest in a more concrete way that
we can build on attribute specialization to much greater capability
later on -- not to add more to the DITA 1.1 plate. I'm sorry if I
didn't make that clear.
Thanks,
Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com
"Esrig,
Bruce (Bruce)" <esrig@lucent.com>
I thought that was the
strength of it ... no action items!
I thought I was clearing away
side issues, leaving the following:
Item 1. Michael's proposal
Item 2. An alternate proposal,
yet to be named (see next paragraph)
Item 2. Now that Dana Spradley
has extracted the attribute extension thoughts from Erik's "Extreme"
paper, we seem to have two viable approaches on the table.
I had not realized that
specialization of an element could both
- restrict the content
- add attributes
So we'll need to look at that.
Bruce
|