I agree with Robert. I feel we should add the correctly spelled
attribute and let the mistake filter out in 2.0; and the we should
deprecate the bad attribute in 1.1. It's only a minor DTD/XSD update
that's low risk (well, almost no-risk) and some documentation updates.
Gershon.
--
Robert D Anderson wrote:
> After thinking about this more and consulting a few co-workers, I'd really
> prefer Paul's third approach now:
>> 3. allow both longdescref and longdescre attributes on object
>> for 1.1---deprecating longdescre and removing it in 2.0--so
>> that any legacy files using the misspelling won't cause
>> validation errors when used with the DTDs, but indicate
>> that implementations do not need to do anything with the
>> longdescre attribute (since I'm sure no implementations
>> do anything with it now).
>
> I do think it's relatively unlikely that people are using this attribute
> today. However, I think it's possible that somebody would set it without
> noticing that a letter was missing. They wouldn't know it was broken unless
> they looked at the docs at the same time, or carefully checked the output
> to find it was not working.
>
> Rather than have people blame DITA (or their current tool) when their docs
> no longer validate, I'd rather deprecate it for a while first. We can have
> the toolkit warn people and explain how to fix the problem; the language
> reference can indicate that tools may issue an error for the bad version.
>
> Anybody else care about this, aside from myself and Paul?
>
> Thanks-
>
> Robert D Anderson
