Re: Scoped Keys and Relationship Tables: I Think We Need to Say Something in the Spec

[Eliot Kimber <eliot.kimber@servicenow.com>]

As discussed in the 13 Dec 2022 TC meeting: we are agreed that there’s no good reason for the specification to say anything about how reltables might be manipulated, literally or conceptually—it’s sufficient to say that the reltables establish links based on the references made by the topicrefs in them using normal scoped key resolution processing and leave it at that.

 

I’ve attached an updated test set that exercises scoped reltable keyrefs and makes it easier to see what’s happening. I’ve attached the source and PDF generated from it using OT 3.7.4. OT almost gets the desired answer but does not correctly resolve the scoped keyrefs from the relationship table in the second submap (submap-02). That suggests it’s resolving the reference to key “topic-02” from the reltable in submap-02 in the context of the first submap rather than in the context of the second submap.

 

Cheers,

 

E.

_____________________________________________

Eliot Kimber

Sr Staff Content Engineer

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From: dita@lists.oasis-open.org <dita@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>
Date: Monday, December 12, 2022 at 11:14 AM
To: DITA Technical Committee (dita@lists.oasis-open.org) <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: [dita] Re: Scoped Keys and Relationship Tables: I Think We Need to Say Something in the Spec

[External Email]

 

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The whole time Eliot was going over this issue last week I kept thinking “Why are we talking about pulling the reltables from the submaps ‘up into’ the root map?”

 

Yes, beginning with DITA 1.0 we thought that intermediate results of processing needed to be valid DITA, but we’ve moved away from that.

 

Perhaps for DITA 2.0 we need to get rid of verbiage such as “union of relationship tables,” and instead refer to something like “a union of the resolved links.” We specify what we expect to be the final resolved links, and then let processors choose the methodology that they want to use.

 

Best,

Kris

 

Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Owner, Eberlein Consulting LLC
kris@eberleinconsulting.com

Skype: kriseberlein; voice: +1 (919) 622-1501

 

Attachment: scoped-reltables.zip
Description: scoped-reltables.zip

Attachment: scoped-reltables.pdf
Description: scoped-reltables.pdf