Key precedence, binding of controlled values, and subjectScheme

[Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>]

As I work through the subjectScheme topics, I've developed the following questions:

1) In the following scenario, what happens to the subject definition with a duplicate key? Is it ignored and thus the subject definitions that it contains are also ignored?

<subjectScheme>
  <subjectdef keys="os">
    <subjectdef keys="solaris"/>
    <subjectdef keys="hpunix"/>
  </subjectdef>
   . . .
  <subjectdef keys="os">
    <subjectdef keys="linux"/>
    <subjectdef keys="mswin"/>
    <subjectdef keys="zos"/>
  </subjectdef>

We essentially have this code example in the spec. I would have assumed that the 2nd subject definition would need to reference the os subject by the @keyref attribute in order to merge additional subjects ...

2) What about the following situation? Is the 2nd binding of the @platform attribute ignored, or does it override the binding in the base scheme?

Here is the contents of baseScheme.ditamap, which defines the os subject and binds its values to the @platform attribute:

<subjectScheme>
  <subjectdef keys="os" navtitle="Operating system">
    <subjectdef keys="linux" navtitle="Linux">
      <subjectdef keys="redhat" navtitle="RedHat Linux"/>
      <subjectdef keys="suse"   navtitle="SuSE Linux"/>
    </subjectdef>
    <subjectdef keys="mswin" navtitle="Windows"/>
    <subjectdef keys="zos"   navtitle="z/OS"/>
  </subjectdef>
  <enumerationdef>
    <attributedef name="platform"/>
    <subjectdef keyref="os"/>
  </enumerationdef>
</subjectScheme>
 
Another subjectScheme map contains the following content:

<subjectScheme>
  <schemeref href=""/>
  . . .
 <subjectdef keys="app" navtitle="Applications">
      <subjectdef keys="apacheserv" navtitle="Apache Web Server"/>
      <subjectdef keys="mysql"      navtitle="MySQL Database"/>
 </subjectdef>
  . . .
  <enumerationdef>
    <attributedef name="platform"/>
    <subjectdef keyref="app"/>
  </enumerationdef>
</subjectScheme>

Best,
Kris

Kristen James Eberlein
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
Co-chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)