RE: [dita] DITA 1.1 DTD error

["Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com>]

fwiw, I've already decided to implement my suggestion #3
in Arbortext's imminent patch release (a one line addition
to the DTD) as far as the DTD is concerned.

I also note that it's pretty trivial using a wide variety
of tools to look for (using XPath notation just for
convenience) object[not(@longdescref)]/@longdescre and 
set that object element's @longdescref attribute to the
value had by that object element's @longdescre attribute.

As far as deprecating longdescre, I'd like to retract what
I said in my earlier suggestion.  (In fact, even when I
wrote it, I didn't mean literal "deprecation", but upon
rereading my comment, it does sound like I did.)

Since no version of spec itself refers to the longdescre
attribute, I see no reason to add text to the spec saying
that such an attribute is deprecated.  In fact, no such
attribute ever existed as far as the spec was concerned.
The "existence" of this attribute is really just an artifact
of a typo in one file of the distribution, but this attribute
in the true sense never existed as part of DITA 1.0 or 1.1,
and I have no desire to add a mention of it in the DITA 1.1
spec.  

Instead, we can put comments in the DTD explaining things,
and we can put a note somewhere in the distribution in some
README or Release Notes sort of file, but I would argue that
we shouldn't confuse the issue (which, I suspect, is probably
a non-issue for 99.9% of all DITA users) by mentioning this
in the DITA 1.1 spec (and then having to say in the 2.0 spec
that the deprecated longdescre attribute has been removed).

paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert D Anderson [mailto:robander@us.ibm.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, 2007 January 09 08:09
> To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: RE: [dita] DITA 1.1 DTD error
> 
> 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