Re: 13056 and Attribute Domains

[Robert D Anderson <robander@us.ibm.com>]

For the first question - no, this is not designed to allow you to create
legal specializations of product, audience, etc. Reasoning is: @props is
the only one designated for specialization, and is set up in the DTD/XSD to
allow you to extend it with domain modules. Processors are able to detect
specialized attributes based off of the @domains value on the topic, which
are required as part of the attribute specialization process. The original
four do not have any way to trace back to @props, which is why they can't
fall in the specialization path - to put them in that path would require
small but backwards incompatible changes to document types. So I believe
the choices if we want to allow extension are:
1) Allow this grouping mechanism, but do not allow specialization
2) Make them into specializable attributes -- giving us @base, @props,
@product, @platform, @audience, and @otherprops as independent,
specializable attributes.

Apart from making me feel generally uncomfortable, option #2 there would
not meet Su-Laine's original goal of allowing some form of extension
without DTD/XSD updates.

For the second question - that should already be the case, though
technically the specification only says that applications "should" support
both the general and specialized forms:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/archSpec/attributegeneralize.html

The only real difference with support for generalized forms here and in
@props is that this proposal does not necessitate a new @domains token. So,
there is no way to connect product="database(a b)" to an actual @database
attribute.

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)



From:	"Chris Nitchie" <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com>
To:	Robert D Anderson/Rochester/IBM@IBMUS,
            <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>,
Date:	03/05/2013 12:15
Subject:	13056 and Attribute Domains



Robert,

With these changes, could you create an attribute domain for a new
attribute based on product, audience, etc.? Or would this strictly be a
mechanism for grouping values in the standard conditional processing
attributes?

Could you specify groupings in other attributes specialized from @props? If
so, would that necessitate support for nested groupings in the generalized
form?

Chris



                                                         
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