Re: [dita] DITA 1.2 - element aliasing and namespaces

Hi, Dana:

Interesting.  I hadn't made the connection between element aliasing and <data>-to-attribute mutability (for which Bruce Esrig was one proponent, if I recall). I can certainly see the conceptual benefits you point out of having a single fundamental story and the convenience for generalization. 

One issue would be how runtime processors of documents get access to the type inheritance information about an attribute specialized from <data> (or, maybe better, from a <data> specialization that has no content).  If DITA continues to use architectural attributes, there would have to be an architectural attribute (maybe on the <topic> element?) that declares the ancestry of the added attribute.  

Another issue would be that <data> or the base element for specialized attributes would have to be available everywhere.

Something to mull...

Thanks,

Erik Hennum



Dana Spradley <>

Dana Spradley <> 

02/20/2007 12:10 PM

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Re: [dita] DITA 1.2 - element aliasing and namespaces

...

And I think it might also be the most appropriate place to handle the long-deferred project to allow adding implementation-specific metadata attributes to arbitrary elements.

Such attributes could be considered renamings of contained data or associated data-about elements whose name attribute has the same name as the implementation-specific attribute's name.

This makes more sense to me than evolving a specialization/generalization mechanism for such attributes, given that data elements, like implementation-specific attributes, have no generic processing.