FW: RNG to DTD

Hi Scott,

Here is discussion from last summer about why no amendments in booklists. Part of it is a technical issue.

Ãric Sirois

DITA Toolsmithâ

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From: Eliot Kimber <ekimber@contrext.com>
Sent: August 13, 2018 10:53 AM
To: Ãric Sirois <eric.sirois@ixiasoft.com>
Cc: Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>
Subject: Re: RNG to DTD

The RNG must conform to DTD constraints, unfortunately, so a given element must have the same content model everywhere it is used. That means booklists has to be a union of everything that would be wanted at the front or back of a manual or you would need two different booklist element types in order to have different content models. That seems like a reasonable solution, e.g. âbooklists-frontmatterâ, âbooklists-backmatterâ. Ideally we would have a domain that defines the abstract base type from which specific booklist specializations would be derived (i.e., move current booklists to a domain and then use that domain as the basis for whatever specialized booklists you need). But I realize that goes beyond the current remit for BookMap 2.0.

Cheers,

Eliot Kimber

http://contrext.com

From: Eric Sirois <eric.sirois@ixiasoft.com>
Date: Monday, August 13, 2018 at 9:35 AM
To: Eliot Kimber <ekimber@contrext.com>
Cc: Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>
Subject: RNG to DTD

Hi Eliot,

Iâm working on the changes to bookmap for DITA 2.0 and one change we wanted to do was to move <amendments> into <booklists>. Thatâs easily doable with RNG and XSD, but no so much with DTDs and likely the reason why it's designed that way in the current DTDs. The concern that I have at the moment is that when we do an RNG to DTD conversion, we are going to run into the same issue again because itâs not technically feasible in the DTD world unless Iâm missing something.

The technical issue is that the content model for booklists front matter would be different than the content model for booklists in the backmatter. If we canât get the design we want to work in the DTD world, then I think we should leave things as is for DITA 2.0.

Thoughts?