Re: [dita] LwDITA markup inconsistency, missing keyref on highlight elem

Subject: Re: [dita] LwDITA markup inconsistency, missing keyref on highlight elements

All I can say is: "Ooops!"

I think the "keyref for inline and conref for block" principle of XDITA has been there since day 1. I honestly do not rememberÂwhere it came from. Michael?

I would be happy (and so would the earlyÂXDITA adopters) if keyref becomes legal in those highlightÂelements.

Best,

CarlosÂ

--Â

Carlos Evia, Ph.D.

Professor and Associate Dean for Transdisciplinary Initiatives

Chief Technology Officer

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112

(540)231-2373 | cevia@vt.edu

On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 2:57 PM Robert Anderson <robert.dan.anderson@oracle.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Perhaps I should stop digging through DTDs and RNGs, but while doing so I've found another inconsistency. This one is actually an issue for LwDITA rather than for the base spec, but addressing it likely impacts the base spec.

In LwDITA, all phrase-level reuse is done with the keyref attribute, rather than conref, as part of an effort to make sure there is only one way to reuse any type of phrase. This means that the LwDITA modules expect keyref to be on highlight elements such as , , and , as well as the upcoming elements and . The %variable-content; entity in here adds keyref to five highlight elements:

https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita-lwdita/blob/master/org.oasis-open.xdita/dtd/lw-highlightDomain.mod#L45

The problem is that in the base DITA vocabulary, none of these elements allow keyref, so specifying it on LwDITA highlight phrases means that those elements are no longer a valid subset of DITA. It's not there in DITA 1.3 grammar and it's still not there in the DITA 2.0 definition.

Digging deep into memory, the only reason I can think of that it was left off was to nudge authors into using more semantic elements for reuse. These elements all specialize from <ph> which does allow key references, so it would be legal to add it. Given the LwDITA use case, it seems like at this point we should probably let these elements use keyref, unless there is a compelling reason to keep it off. If we do decide to keep it off, that means a fair bit of churn in how reuse is managed in the context of LwDITA.

Thanks,

Robert

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