dita — archive

[Scott Prentice]

I think that the key point of possible confusion is the term "source." The "target" of an href/conref (I assume these concepts equally apply to xrefs/links/topicrefs as well?) is clearly the element that is referenced by that attribute, but calling the file or element that's doing the referencing the "source" doesn't really make much sense to me. This becomes particularly confusing to authors because the term "source" in "single sourcing" typically refers to the content that is being reused, which in this situation would be the "target." It does seem that we might want to make an effort to standardize on some terminology, and I for one would vote for not using the term "source" for either end of this chain. As Jeff suggests, perhaps we should come up with terms that can be used which are less ambiguous. For the href/conref end, perhaps (just throwing out ideas, none seem all that good though) .. - referencing element - container - referencer (yuck) - caller And for the other end, perhaps .. - referenced element - target .. hmm, there must be better terms. ...scott Robert D Anderson wrote: > In all of the material I've added to the spec, I've referred to the > "target" as the item pointed to by the conref attribute. Like Eliot, I've > thought of conref as an address, which points to a target. However, I've > always recognized some confusion with source/target on their own, so when I > talk about it, I usually try to call it "the target of the conref > attribute" to try and be explicit. > > Not sure that helps any, but it means if we go the other way, I know all of > the conref material I've put in the spec needs to be reversed. > > Robert D Anderson > IBM Authoring Tools Development > Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit > > "Ogden, Jeff"