dita — archive

[Paul Grosso]

The description of the href attribute in the language reference says: Non-DITA targets use standard URL syntax. DITA content is targetted as follows: Target elsewhere in the same file: href="#topicID" href="#topicID/elemID Target in a different file: href="filename.dita#topicID" href="fname.dita#topicID/elemID" That makes it sound like references to DITA content do not necessarily use URI syntax. Specifically, many operating systems allow the # character in a file name, and the above description does not seem to disallow that (though it would sure make a mess of trying to parse such a value). In the DITA 1.1 Arch. Spec near the start of Chapter 4 in the section on IDs and references it says: The complete identifier for a topic consists of the combination of the URI for the document instance, a separating hash character, and the topic id (as in http://some.org/some/directory/topicfile.xml#topicid). URIs are described in RFC 2396. [Actually, 2396 is obsolete and superceded by 3986 at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt in 2005 which we should reference instead.] And a little later in the same section: The complete identifier for a map element consists of the combination of the absolute URI for the map document instance and the element id (as in http://some.org/some/directory/mapfile.xml#topicrefid). So it sounds like it is already the case that the href values are always URIs and we just need to clean up the language a bit in the DITA 1.1 Language Reference Manual to make sure this is clear. It might be helpful to add a note somewhere suggesting percent-encoding (per RFC 3986) if there is a need to represent a certain character in an href value that is not allowed in a URI. paul