Re: [dita] DITA 1.1 DTD error

[Gershon L Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>]

I agree with Robert. I feel we should add the correctly spelled 
attribute and let the mistake filter out in 2.0; and the we should 
deprecate the bad attribute in 1.1. It's only a minor DTD/XSD update 
that's low risk (well, almost no-risk) and some documentation updates.

Gershon.
--

Robert D Anderson wrote:
> After thinking about this more and consulting a few co-workers, I'd really
> prefer Paul's third approach now:
>> 3.  allow both longdescref and longdescre attributes on object
>>     for 1.1---deprecating longdescre and removing it in 2.0--so
>>     that any legacy files using the misspelling won't cause
>>     validation errors when used with the DTDs, but indicate
>>     that implementations do not need to do anything with the
>>     longdescre attribute (since I'm sure no implementations
>>     do anything with it now).
> 
> I do think it's relatively unlikely that people are using this attribute
> today. However, I think it's possible that somebody would set it without
> noticing that a letter was missing. They wouldn't know it was broken unless
> they looked at the docs at the same time, or carefully checked the output
> to find it was not working.
> 
> Rather than have people blame DITA (or their current tool) when their docs
> no longer validate, I'd rather deprecate it for a while first. We can have
> the toolkit warn people and explain how to fix the problem; the language
> reference can indicate that tools may issue an error for the bad version.
> 
> Anybody else care about this, aside from myself and Paul?
> 
> Thanks-
> 
> Robert D Anderson