Re: [dita] DITA and Namespaces? A Potential Compromise Solution for DITA 1.3?

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@rsicms.com>]

Yes, Clark notation would work, but it would be very verbose. It would have
a meaningful effect on storage of DITA content in CMS systems that store
documents fully expanded (e.g., MarkLogic).

Not that that's sufficient to disqualify the approach, but it is a concern.
It would also make the code that matches on those values verbose or
necessarily indirect but not through normal namespace prefix means (that is,
you'd have to create XSLT variables for the namespace names so you could
then refer to them in match expressions).

I guess I'd rather have a more compact syntax at the cost of a little
processing. Moore's law continues to hold but verbose syntax is always
verbose.

Cheers,

E.

On 5/22/12 1:43 PM, "Jirka Kosek" <jirka@kosek.cz> wrote:

> On 17.5.2012 22:42, Eliot Kimber wrote:
> 
>> That leaves the problem of validating that a given element is in fact the
>> element type named in its class value. For example, consider these two
>> elements:
>> 
>> <bar:foo xmlns:bar="http://example.com/ns1";
>>   class="- topic/topic bar:foo/bar:foo "
>>> 
>> 
>> <foo xmlns="http://example.com/ns1";
>>   class="- topic/topic bar:foo/bar:foo "
>>> 
>> 
>> Both elements are of the same type--{http://example.com/ns1}:foo--but the
>> first one satisfies the DITA "tagname matches class" rule and the second does
>> not.
>> 
>> To enable complete validation of the type to the class, we would need a
>> separate DITA-specific namespace declaration, e.g.:
>> 
>> <foo xmlns="http://example.com/ns1";
>>  xmlns:dita_ns="http://oasis-open.org/DITA/namespace/DITA-ns-prefix-binding";
>>  dita_ns:bar="http://example.com/ns1";
>>  class="- topic/topic bar:foo/bar:foo "
> 
> Wouldn't it be easier to use Clark notation in @class and prevent all
> problems related to prefixes and QNames used in attributes, something like:
> 
> <bar:foo xmlns:bar="http://example.com/ns1";
>    class="- topic/topic
> {http://example.com/ns1}foo/{http://example.com/ns1}foo "
> 
> @class would be verbose then but this shouldn't matter as it is
> automatically injected from schema into document.
> 
> I think that given current performance penalty of relying on @class
> values for matching using indirection mechanism here (prefixes) would
> decrease perfomance by another grade.
> 
> Jirka
> 

-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect, RSI Content Solutions
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
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http://xmlpress.net/publications/dita/practitioners-1/