Hi, Dana:
Interesting. I hadn't made the connection between element aliasing and <data>-to-attribute mutability (for which Bruce Esrig was one proponent, if I recall). I can certainly see the conceptual benefits you point out of having a single fundamental story and the convenience for generalization.
One issue would be how runtime processors of documents get access to the type inheritance information about an attribute specialized from <data> (or, maybe better, from a <data> specialization that has no content). If DITA continues to use architectural attributes, there would have to be an architectural attribute (maybe on the <topic> element?) that declares the ancestry of the added attribute.
Another issue would be that <data> or the base element for specialized attributes would have to be available everywhere.
Something to mull...
Thanks,
Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com
Dana Spradley <dana.spradley@oracle.com>
02/20/2007 12:10 PM |
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And I think it might also be the most appropriate place to handle the long-deferred project to allow adding implementation-specific metadata attributes to arbitrary elements.
Such attributes could be considered renamings of contained data or associated data-about elements whose name attribute has the same name as the implementation-specific attribute's name.
This makes more sense to me than evolving a specialization/generalization mechanism for such attributes, given that data elements, like implementation-specific attributes, have no generic processing.
