Re: [dita] Foreign Generalization: Should be moved to a non-normativeappendix

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

Hmm, you're right. So I was right all along.

Hmph and hmph again.

However, in thinking about this in some detail, I've come to the conclusion
that there's no reliable way to manage escaped foreign content through
multiple sequences of transform.

In particular, if we said that DITA-to-DITA transforms must *always* escape
content and respecialization transforms unescape it one level, that will
work if the output of the transform is *always* the input to a
respecialization. But what if it's the input to a transform that does
something other than respecialization, either type-to-type transformation or
partial generalization?

In that case, it's impossible for a transform to know how many levels of
escaping have been applied relative to the original topic. And it doesn't
work to say that all transforms must unescape and then re-escape because
that only works if they are not the first in a sequence of such transforms
and there's no way to know if you are the first transform in a sequence.

For example, say I start with a topic of Type A and I transform it to a
topic of Type B, escaping all <foreign> content. I then transform the topic
of Type B to a generic topic, again escaping all of the <foreign> content.
At this point the <foreign> content is doubly escaped, not what I wanted. I
then respecialize the generic topic back to a topic of Type B. I blindly
unescape the content but it's still escaped one level. In this scenario,
there is no way for a given transform to know how many levels of escaping
have been applied.

So this suggests that escaping is not a viable option, which brings us back
to side files being the only reliable option for handling <foreign> content
through DITA-to-DITA transformations.

Cheers,

Eliot

On 12/2/09 3:24 PM, "Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com> wrote:

> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, 2009 December 02 15:19
>> To: Michael Priestley
>> Cc: dita; Grosso, Paul
>> Subject: Re: [dita] Foreign Generalization: Should be moved to a non-
>> normative appendix
> 
> . . .
> 
>> Also, I was mistaken in my assertion that <foreign> can contain
>> untagged
>> text content--it can't (I had forgotten that ANY content models are
>> still
>> element only). So even if you have a data format that is not itself
>> XML,
>> you'd still have to define a new element type to hold it.
> 
> That's incorrect.  Quoting point 4 of the "element valid" VC in
> XML (at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#elementvalid):
> 
> The declaration matches ANY, and the content (after replacing any entity
> references with their replacement text) consists of character data,
> CDATA sections, comments, PIs  and child elements whose types have been
> declared.
> 
> paul
> 
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-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 610.631.6770
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