Questions emerging in the review of the metadata element

[Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>]

Hi, folks.

There are a lot of questions emerging in the review of the metadata elements. I'm going to create a list of items that we might want to discuss on the TC call. In no particular order:

1. This element (series|brand|author|etc.)Â does not take the @keyref attribute. Why not? And why is @keyref available on <publisher>?
   
   
2. Why are we mentioning where an element is equivalent to Dublin Core? Shall we remove this information? Cross reference the Dublin Core spec?
   
   
3. Is there an interaction between certain elements (audience, platform, product) and the similarly-named attribute?
   
   
4. @content on <othermeta> holds translatable content. Should we fix this for DITA 2.0?
   
   
5. Why don't we mention anything about processing for this element? It only seems to be useful IF you build specialized processing ...
   
   
6. General puzzlement about the original design of these elements, which reflect usage within IBM circa 2000-ish ...

I confess, I don't usually use many of these elements, nor have implementations that I've designed.

My personal usage (and OOB usage for implementations):

• <author>
• <category>
• <copyright>
• <keywords>
• <metadata>
• <othermeta>

I've certainly specialized a lot of metadata elements for clients. The use cases for specialized metadata elements usually are the following:

• Need to store metadata from a legacy system
• Particular requirements for a portal, viewing system, print/PDF output

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Best,
Kris