dita message

Subject: Cleaning up specializations of body elements

From: Robert Anderson <robert.dan.anderson@oracle.com>
To: DITA TC <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2021 15:14:44 +0000

Hi,

I'd like to recommend another DITA 2.0 "cleanup" item, this one for specializations of <body> like the <conbody> and <refbody> elements. It requires a bit of history though.

In DITA 1.0, all body elements could not be filtered. We didn't allow attributes like audience. I have a vague memory that they were treated like titles, basically "you should not be able to filter this because every concept should have a concept body."

In DITA 1.1 this was updated for <body>, but not for specialized elements like <conbody>. As of DITA 1.1, the body element used all of the common / universal attributes, including the filter attributes. Conbody, taskbody, etc continued to drop the filter attributes, even though the elements themselves were optional.

That continues today. Most specialized body elements have a confusing attribute list of "All the universal stuff, except for the filter attributes for unexplained reasons."

This seems like a really old oversight we should clean up in DITA 2.0 -- for any specialized body element in the standard grammars, we should update the attribute list to match the attribute list for body itself.

Thanks,

Robert