Paul Prescod wrote:
> Of your six potential requirement I only intended to deal with "1.".
>
> With respect to 2: I see no reason to ALLOW a type to DISALLOW further
> extension by its sub-types. It feels like extra work to no benefit.
Within an enterprise you may want to disallow further specialization of
a set of types. That is, one key benefit of specialization is that it
can be *controlled*. Thus it follows that you should have the option of
disallowing it, as well as allowing it.
I realize that this is probably a fairly uncommon case, but I suggest it
for completeness.
> Similarly, for 3: I don't think that DITA really has a notion of
> instance attributes and I don't see a strong argument for it.
There is an at least implicit distinction between DITA-defined
attributes and all other attributes.
This ability would be analogous to the ability to indicate whether or
not attributes must be qualified in an XSD schema. For example, to avoid
confusion you want to require that any non-DITA-defined attributes used
in your specialized documents be qualified, so as it to make it extra
clear that these attributes are not DITA-defined.
This is recognition of the fundamental problem of recognition posed by
the use of the no-namespace namespace--namely, you have no reliable,
general way to tell what application the attributes correspond to. Thus
it seems like it might be useful to disallow the confusion by requiring
non-DITA-defined attributes to be qualified.
Cheers,
E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9390 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 372-8155
www.innodata-isogen.com
