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Subject: XML Data type in spec: keep or remove?


Close readers of the 1.3 draft should have noticed that almost every attribute definition includes information about the XML data type for that attribute. For example, "This attribute is defined with the XML Data Type CDATA."

The data type is really only there because it was there in the attribute tables from older versions of the spec. For <resourceid> in particular, I had a draft comment asking if this was useful - we state that the date attributes use the format YYYY-MM-DD, but then note that the attribute is CDATA. This prompted the following comment exchange:

Eliot Kimber: Specifying the DTD data type is not that interesting in general, I think. It's available in the grammars and not going to be of much interest to authors. Implementors know where to look.
Robert Anderson: I agree. It was preserved because it was in all previous versions (as part of the attribute tables). I felt some resistence to removing it, which is why it was kept in. Referring to TC to get a position.

I can't remember if anybody really resisted removing this, or if I imagined it. So at this point, would anybody object to removing the "this is defined with XML data type XXXX" comments unless they are explicitly needed to differentiate something, as in an ID with type ID vs an ID with type CDATA?

Thanks,

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://www.dita-ot.org/)



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