task vs. general task, constraints, conref, and other related issues

The ongoing discussion that started with Joann’s notes about “Problems with the task model” has become quite wide ranging. So wide ranging, that I’m having trouble keeping track of what we have decided for DITA 1.2, what remains to be decided for DITA 1.2, and what are a topics for future discussion for DITA 1.3 or DITA 2.0. This note is my attempt to summarize the discussion so far.

1. The TC has decided that strict task rather than general task should be included in the ditabase doctype shell that is included as part of Technical Content. DTDs, XSDs, and the DITA 1.2 specification will all need to be updated.

2. There is an open question about the need to include a second ditabase doctype shell that would include general task rather than strict task. The TC seemed to be leaning toward not including a second ditabase doctype shell, but I don’t think there is a consensus about that and a final decision remains to be made. If a decision is made to include a second ditabase, we would need to pick a location for the additional doctype shell, filenames, a Public ID, and a URI, and the DTDs, XSDs, and the DITA specification would all need to e updated.

3. There is a preliminary proposal to allow “weak” constraints to be declared. So far no one has raised technical complaints about the proposal. There has been support for including the proposal as part of DITA 1.2 expressed by several people. There have been reservations about considering the proposal this late in the DITA 1.2 cycle. I expressed a reservation about this making things more complicated with the possibility of yet more combinations of things. There is a concern that MP and others may not have the necessary bandwidth in the short run to turn this into a more formal and complete proposal. If the proposal does go forward, the TC will need to make some decisions about using “week” or “strict” constraints for task.dtd and ditabase.dtd.

4. There have been a lot of discussions about what is and isn’t or what should and shouldn’t be valid when using conref. There is one question about doing conref validation based on content models in DTDs or XSDs rather than information in the domains attribute value. I’m not aware of any other specific open questions or decisions for DITA 1.2 coming out of this portion of the discussion.

5. Questions have been raised about the constraints mechanism in general and if it was appropriate to use it to implement the new versions of task that are part of DITA 1.2. I don’t think there has been a formal proposal to withdraw constraints from DITA 1.2 or to reimplement the versions of task without using constraints, but that might yet come up.

And that is pretty much everything that I think has come up in the public discussions so far. Did I leave anything out?

I’ve been involved in or started some private discussions where some other issues were raised:

6. The names we have for task.dtd, generalTask.dtd, task.mod, task.ent, strictTaskbodyConstraint.mod and the associated XSDs, Public IDs, and URIs seem confusing. Would new names for some of the these items help? For compatibility reasons we’d probably need to use the same sort of trick we used with glossary and glossentry, so the old names would continue to work.

7. Are many of the issues we’ve been discussing tied to shortcomings of ditabases and shortcomings of DTDs --that a ditabase can only contain a single use (constrained or unconstrained) of a particular info type? Should we look for a way to remove or relax that restriction in DITA 1.3 or 2.0?

8. Some questions about topic nesting, conref validation, and the domains attribute that Eliot added to the list of things to consider for DITA 1.3.

I’m guessing that there may be other topics from private discussions that aren’t known to the entire list. If there are and if they need to be considered for DITA 1.2, please put them forward now.

-Jeff

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