Proposed Issue: Namespaces for domains and topic types

DITA domains names and topic types currently form a flat
namespace of short words (let’s call them “topic names” as a short
form). Topic names are not grounded in any namespace (e.g. DNS, ISBN) that is managed
on a large scale. Without this grounding, one of two situations is inevitable: 

 

 
The DITA community will somehow
     centralize the assignment of topic names – resulting in overhead
     every time anyone wishes to specialize DITA.

 
Topic types will clash with
     other topic types, causing problems for processing triggered off of topic
     type name (e.g. XSLT processing, metadata extraction)

 

Neither of these situations seem acceptable. Therefore, I
propose that DITA topic types and domain names be somehow connected to an
externally managed namespace such as DNS or ISBN. There are many syntactic ways
that this could be achieved. For example, class attributes could be constructed
like this:

 

class=”- org.oasis.DITA/topic com.ibm.apidoc/apidoc
com.blastradius/DOMAPI “

 

Or namespaces could express a mapping from domain names to
URLs:

 

<foo xmlns:topic=”http://.../”
xmlns:blastradius=”http://”>

<mytopic class=”topic/topic blastradius/mytopic”>

…

</mytopic>

</foo>

 

There are other syntaxes possible.

 

 Paul Prescod

 Blast Radius XMetaL