Re: [dita] Proposal for Triage: RelaxNG for DITA Vocabulary

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

+1 for officially supporting RELAX NG schemas

				Jirka

On 22.5.2012 23:06, Scott Hudson wrote:
> I agree. This is extremely powerful.
> 
> Eliot, I would be willing to help with any editorial work as well.
> 
> Thanks and best regards,
> 
> --Scott
> 
> Scott Hudson |  Pelco by Schneider Electric | United States | Standards Lead
> Ph: +1-970-282-1952  | M: +1-720-663-7268 | Site: pdn.pelco.com |
> scott.hudson@schneider-electric.com
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> On 5/22/12 10:31 PM, "Eliot Kimber" <ekimber@rsicms.com> wrote:
> 
>> George Bina from SynchroSoft (OxygenXML) has developed a technique and
>> supporting software for using RelaxNG for defining DITA vocabulary modules.
>> He has made this work available through the open-source dita-ng project:
>> http://code.google.com/p/dita-ng/. This project provides a complete RelaxNG
>> expression of the DITA 1.2 vocabulary and constraint modules and document
>> type shells.
>>
>> George presented on his work at the DITA North America conference and those
>> of us who saw it were very excited.
>>
>> To date, the main barrier to using RelaxNG for DITA vocabulary has been that
>> RelaxNG did not have a built-in mechanism for defining default attribute
>> values. This made it unsuitable for normal DITA use where we don't want the
>> @class and @domains attribute explicit in our source documents.
>>
>> RelaxNG now has a companion specification that provides a way to define
>> attribute defaults. George has implemented processing for this specification
>> as an extension to the standard RelaxNG Java library (and has or will
>> contribute that code back to the main projects). It works with any
>> Java-based process that can add the necessarily libraries, including the
>> DITA Open Toolkit.
>>
>> With the ability to define default attributes through RelaxNG, it now
>> becomes possible to use RelaxNG with DITA documents just as you would DTDs
>> or XSDs.
>>
>> That's useful in and of itself.
>>
>> But what really got us excited was the way that RelaxNG's design makes it
>> about as easy as it could possibly be to do module integration and
>> constraint.
>>
>> Here is the RelaxNG for the module inclusions for the topic document type
>> shell
>>
>>   <!-- Include modules -->
>>   <include href="../../base/rng/topic.mod.rng">
>>     <!--
>>       Redefine the infotype entity to exclude
>>       other topic types and disallow nesting
>>     -->
>>     <define name="topic-info-types">
>>       <ref name="topic.element"/>
>>     </define>
>>   </include>
>>   <include href="../../base/rng/highlightDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="../../base/rng/utilitiesDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="../../base/rng/indexingDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="../../base/rng/hazardstatementDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="abbreviateDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="uiDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="programmingDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>   <include href="softwareDomain.mod.rng"/>
>>
>>
>> That's it. Each module declares how it contributes itself to the larger
>> whole like so:
>>
>> The @domains contribution:
>>
>>   <define name="domains-atts-value" combine="choice">
>>     <value>(topic abbrev-d)</value>
>>   </define>
>>   
>> Content model extensions:
>>
>>   <!-- Define domain extension patterns -->
>>   <define name="abbrev-d-term">
>>     <ref name="abbreviated-form.element"/>
>>   </define>
>>   
>>   <!-- Extend the patterns with the domain contribution -->
>>   <define name="term" combine="choice">
>>     <ref name="abbrev-d-term"/>
>>   </define>
>>   
>>
>> This is simply saying that the <term> element's content is extended by
>> adding <abbreviated-form> as an additional choice.
>>
>> What this means in practice is that the integration of modules is done
>> simply by referencing the modules you want--each module manages its own
>> integration details. There is no separate integration configuration
>> activity.
>>
>> This makes RelaxNG very attractive as the primary form of vocabulary
>> definition *as long as* one can then reliably generate the DTD and XSD
>> versions of the vocabulary. George is working on implementing that process
>> now and I will probably do some work on it as well.
>>
>> Personally, I'm very excited about this because it gives me the potential to
>> greatly simplify the task of defining and maintaining large vocabulary sets,
>> such as DITA for Publishers and allows the easy provisioning of both DTD and
>> XSD forms.
>>
>> RelaxNG also provides for embedding Schematron rules directly in the RelaxNG
>> documents, meaning that a single document can define both the base XML rules
>> and additional rules checkable through Schematron processing (this is also
>> possible in XSD 1.1 with its new "assertion" feature, but support for XSD
>> 1.1 is still not universal).
>>
>> RelaxNG also provides for embedded documentation (similar to how you can do
>> it in XSD). 
>>
>> Even if you never used the RelaxNG modules directly with documents, they
>> would have tremendous value as the development source for the working
>> modules.
>>
>> Given all that, I would like to propose the inclusion of RelaxNG as a
>> recognized DITA schema language in addition to DTD and XSD. I am more than
>> willing to act as champion for this proposal and do the editorial work.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Eliot
>>
> 
> 
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