Linking Related Issues To Considered in 1.1

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>]

These are technical issues that I think will need to be discussed when 
we take the DITA spec forward from the initial submission. I'm capturing 
these now while they're fresh in my mind:

1. General practice for addressing.

    The current DITA spec and/or implementations appear to be using URLs 
with fragement identifiers somewhat informally (i.e., not conforming, 
for example, to the XPointer spec.

    I think that DITA should limit itself to XPointer for addressing.

    Second, I'm now of the opinion that the XInclude style of address 
that uses two attributes, one for the URL with no fragment ID and one 
for the XPointer, is the best design and should be emulated.

2. Role names should be required to be namespaced so that applications 
can formally define role names and clearly relate them to the semantics 
of the role name. For simplicity and backward compatibility we can 
stipulate that the existing DITA-defined role names are in the DITA 
namespace.  The implication here is that DITA processors will 
dereference namespace prefixes on role names in order to construct 
fully-qualified role names before associating roles to semantics.

3. Make sure we've clearly defined the relationship between format= and 
dynamic determination of MIME types for target resources. Format= should 
be a hint that augments whatever might be learned from the MIME type of 
the target.

4. There is a fundamental problem with links and re-use, which is that a 
link to an element may need to indicate what use context the target is 
intended to be resolved in terms of. I think this is an issue for DITA 
and we may need to extend the link syntax to allow for indication of the 
use context for a link target (for example, if the same target is 
conrefed in two places, indicating which of the conrefs you want to use 
when resolving the link target in a given rendition of the topics involved.

Cheers,

E.
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9030 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78758
(512) 372-8122

eliot@innodata-isogen.com
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