Question about overlapping markup from DITA 1.2 and DITA 1.3

[Robert Anderson <robert.dan.anderson@oracle.com>]

While doing cleanup work, I'm wondering about a couple of places where we have overlapping mechanisms for doing the same thing.

First: In DITA 1.2, we had a broad feature to add new elements as replacements for attributes holding translateable text. For example, we added <navtitle> and deprecated @navtitle. As part of this, we added <longquoteref> inside of long quotes, to replace lq/@reftitle. This was missed in the original proposal, and added during editing, which might be why lq/@reftitle was not marked deprecated with the others:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200804/msg00032.html

At this point, we have linking attributes + reftitle on <lq> itself, but we also have <longquoteref> for exactly the same purpose. Should we remove the linking attributes + reftitle, or is there some reason to keep them?

Second: In DITA 1.2, we added <sectiondiv> and <bodydiv> as containers, largely to help with specialization and reuse. The <sectiondiv> element is limited to sections. Part of the goal here was to create such a container without introducing a generic <div> that would appear everywhere and get confused with the HTML <div> tag. Then in DITA 1.3 we added a generic <div> that has exactly the same content model, same attribute set, and is allowed in sections.

Should we consider dropping <sectiondiv> from DITA 2.0? The only remaining use case for it that I can see is that you can create a domain specialization that is only available as a direct child of section, but not as a child of any other element. I'm not sure that is compelling, especially now that you could do the same thing by specializing <div> with an expansion module.

Thanks,
Robert