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Subject: How To Specify the Relationship Type Defined By A reltable?
Relationship tables create extended links that relate the resources pointed to by the cells in a given row in the table. The documentation for reltable in the language reference makes it fairly clear that the title specified for <relcolspec> defines the role played by each column (that is, the anchor roles). However, I'm not seeing anything that directly indicates the link type of the relationship represented by each row. For example, say I wanted to use relationship tables to represent knowledge-type relationships among topics representing specific entities, such as people. I want to have a link type of "married to" that has two roles, "husband" and "wife" and then relates topics for people to indicate that they exist in such a relationship: <reltable > <title>isMarriedTo</title> <relheader> <relcolspec> <topichead> <topicmeta> <navtitle>Husband</navtitle> </topicmeta> </topichead> </relcolspec> <relcolspec> <topichead> <topicmeta> <navtitle>Wife</navtitle> </topicmeta> </topichead> </relcolspec> </relheader> <relrow> <relcell> <topicref href="wek-01.dita"/> </relcell> <relcell> <topicref href="jaw-01.dita"/> </relcell> </relrow> </reltable> In this example, is <title> on <reltable> the intended way to indicate the relationship type? I could see that as being a reasonable expectation, but I could also see <title> being used simply as an informative label for a specific table instance, having nothing to do with the intended link type. That is, I might have two relationship tables for different sets of marriages, for example, marriages in Shakespeare or spouses of famous artists, or whatever, where I want the table title to contribute to some presentation of the tables themselves, rather than the use of the tables simply to generate links in rendered topics. So I think that I would not want <title> to be the primary or only way to indicate link type. Note that while <reltable> takes a @type attribute, my understanding from the spec is that this sets the default value for @type on the topicrefs within the reltable, which is not about link type or anchor roles, but merely about the topic type that can be referenced, which may have nothing to do with the semantic types of the anchors. Was there every any expectation that specializations of reltable or relcell would indicate the link type or anchor roles through their tagnames? I would expect that, simply because it's a useful convenience and I love to do specialization, but I don't see anything in the current spec that supports that expectation and, as there's no attribute that explicitly represents the link type or anchor role (since @type cannot be that indication in the general case), there's no way to set the type as a default through a specialization (at least not a DTD-based specialization, anyway), which I might also have expected. Was link type specification considered in the original design of relationship tables or is this an area we need to clarify or extend in DITA 1.3? Cheers, E. -- Eliot Kimber Senior Solutions Architect "Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together" Main: 512.554.9368 www.reallysi.com www.rsuitecms.com
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