some comemnts on the Draft DITA 1.2 architecture spec.

Some
suggestions with additions underlined and blue
and deletions strikeout and red:

 

Concrete document types

A given DITA map or topic document is governed by a concrete
document type that defines the set of structural modules (topic or map types),
domain modules, and constraints modules that the map or topic can use, as
well as the degree of topic nesting that is allowed within the document type. While
the DITA specification includes a starter set of concrete document types for
common combinations of modules, those document types are not mandatory and, for
most many DITA users, include more things definitions than
they need for their documents. In general, any production use of
DITA involves definition of the DITA
users are encouraged to create their own customized concrete document types
that include the set of modules best suited to local requirements. This always customization
requires the creation of "local shell" document types,
even if all they do is omit unneeded modules or apply constraints to the
standard DITA-defined vocabulary. Thus you should expect in any
production use of DITA that the first step is to define local concrete document
types.

Note: The simplest form of local shell is an
unaltered copy of one of the DITA TC-provided shells to which is associated a new
public identifier or absolute URI, reflecting ownership of the new shell by its creator. For
example, to create a local shell DTD for generic maps, simply copy the
TC-provided file "map.dtd" to a local location, possibly using a new
name for the file to avoid confusion, and create an entity mapping catalog that
binds the new copy of map.dtd to a public ID or absolute URI you
define, e.g. PUBLIC "-//example.com/DTD DITA NewMap//EN or urn:public:example.dom/dita/doctypes/map
urn:example.com:names:dita:xsd:newmap.xsd.

Concrete DITA document types must SHOULD follow
the implementation design patterns defined in this specification. This ensures
consistency of implementation and also serves to make the task of creating
concrete document types almost entirely mechanical.

·        
Modularization
and integration of design

Specialization hierarchies are implemented as sets of vocabulary modules, each
of which declares the markup and entities that are unique to a specialization.
The modules must be integrated into a document type before they can be used.

·        
DTD
syntax specialization design patterns

To be extensible and backward compatible, DITA requires that a DTD
implementation of structural and domain specialization modules SHOULD conform
to well-defined the design
patterns used for the DTD shells included as part of the DITA
specification and described in this topic.

·        
XSD
schema specialization design patterns

To be extensible and backward compatible, DITA requires that an XML
schema implementation of structural and domain specialization modules SHOULD conform
to well-defined the design patterns used
for the XML schema shells included as part fo the DITA specification and
described in this topic.

While we
can require that customized concrete document types follow the rules as
outlined in the DITA 1.2 speciication, I don’t think that we can require
that they follow the design patterns or that the design patterns are well
enough specified to allow them to be a requirement.  At this stage I think
the design patters are more of a “best practice” than a requirement
that must be followed and so they SHOULD be followed rather than MUST be
followed.

 

It
seems likely that the section on “Modularization and integration of
design” should be deleted since it is almost entirely repeating
information that has been provided in the main section..

 

 

 

 

 

For the page dita-1.2-spec/arch/20090617/createConstraintsDomainSpec.html
:

 

I
don’t have any comments on the main topic other than to say that it feels
as of this topic is saying the same thing two or even three times and that
probably isn’t a good idea.