dita — archive

[Robert Anderson]

> Are there any vendors who implement @conref who *don't* do what the Toolkit > does? If so, then we have an interoperation problem. If not, then we can > probably safely codify the Toolkit behavior by adding a specific statement > about @href. The implementations I worked on early in DITA's life blindly copied the href as-is, and when people started getting more adventurous with conref across directory boundaries, it came up very quickly as a bug. To me, it seemed obvious what the behavior *should* be - href is adjusted to remain valid - but I can see Eliot's point that a strict reading of the spec would copy href as-is with other attributes. I'm happy clarifying the spec as Eliot wants to do, because I do think this is the expected and reasonable behavior. In the years we've been adjusting href during conref resolution, I don't think I've ever heard from any user who was surprised by it. But, I'm willing to re-evaluate that opinion if there are vendors or users today who have a reason to support the blind copy. Robert D Anderson IBM Authoring Tools Development Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit