Re: [dita] dita table model

[Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>]

Thanks for the clarification. Sorry if I jumped too soon on a non-issue.

In last week's discussion, wasn't the thought that we should try to provide
whatever the widest possible tag set would be, as a base? Admittedly this
puts more of a strain on the base transforms, but it would then allow the
widest possible range of variations through specialization.

Michael Priestley
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
Dept PRG IBM Canada  phone: 416-915-8262
Toronto Information Development



                                                                                                                                 
                      Paul Grosso                                                                                                
                      <pgrosso@arbortex        To:       dita@lists.oasis-open.org                                               
                      t.com>                   cc:                                                                               
                                               Subject:  Re: [dita] dita table model                                             
                      07/19/2004 09:08                                                                                           
                      PM                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                 



At 17:47 2004-07-19 -0500, Paul Grosso wrote:

>At last week's telcon, during the discussion of what table model
>to use in DITA, it was suggested that forcing users to use
>a particular table model will discourage users who are already
>standardized on a different model.
>
>DITA is a DTD, so right off we are constraining users by defining
>a vocabulary they must use.  DITA goes to greater extents than
>most other vocabularies to provide a controlled way to extend
>the vocabulary, but within fairly limited bounds that ensure the
>benefits of a known vocabulary are not entirely lost.
>
>DITA's extension mechanism maintains most of the benefits of
>a known vocabulary by ensuring that the XSLT already written
>for the known vocabulary will work for newly defined tags.
>
>Doing something like this for disparate table models would be
>very difficult.

Just to clarify:  when I said "doing something like this for
disparate table models" I didn't mean one couldn't use
specialization on table tags.

I meant that one couldn't expect--as one does with specialization--
that one could plug an arbitrary table model into the DITA
vocabulary and have it work in the existing stylesheet and tools.

paul