Re: A workaround for Conref?

Hello Paul,

Paul Prescod wrote:
> Can you please remind me what you said you are doing for XInclude?

We say that we rely on the information which is in the infoset of a
document. If somebody uses XInclude in his document to produce the
infoset, that is fine with us. However, we do not force people who
implement ITS to foresee XInclude or other (i.e. conref) functionality
which changes / augments the infoset .
The statement related to this is at
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-its-20060518/#def-selector :
"Selection relies on the information which is given in the XML
Information Set [XML Infoset]. ITS applications MAY implement inclusion
mechanisms such as XInclude or DITA's [DITA 1.0] conref."

> Obviously the situations are analogous so that would be a starting
> point. Another question:  can ITS processing take advantage of stuff in
> the DTD like entities and fixed attributes? This is important for
> handling DITA specialization.

No, ITS currently can't handle that. I see two possibilities here:

a) Say that if there is a DTD available, ITS "selection" MUST be applied
 after validation, taking entities and fixed attributes into account.
b) Say nothing and leave the question to the individual implementations
(similar to our handling of XInclude / conref ).

From discussions in the past, it seems to me that the ITS working group
would favor b) - but that might hinder ITS adoption for DITA ...

- Felix

> 
> On 6/5/06, *Felix Sasaki* <fsasaki@w3.org <mailto:fsasaki@w3.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Hello Paul,
> 
>     This is Felix Sasaki from W3C. We met at XTech in Amsterdam. I hope you
>     are doing well.
> 
>     Unfortunately we did not have time to talk about DITA during XTech.
>     Currently, the DITA translation sub committee is discussing the ITS
>     draft which I presented at XTech, see [1], to assure that it fits with
>     the DITA concepts. One point I wanted to talk with you in Amsterdam was
>     the notion of Conref. From the standpoint of ITS, it is not feasible to
>     implement Conref or any other mechanism which modifies the infoset, to
>     be able to process DITA files. So my question is if you see any
>     "workarounds" to emulate conref.
> 
>     An example: We have rules about translatability like
> 
>     <its:rules its:version="1.0">
>     <its:translateRule select="//p" translate="yes"/>
>     </its:rules>
> 
>     This rule should affect all <p> elements, no matter if they are
>     physically inside the target document, or only referenced via conref.
>     One workaround I see would be to put all DITA files in one directory and
>     apply the ITS rules to them. If you see any other solutions, it
>     would be
>     good to get your feedback.
> 
>     Thank you very much. Best regards, Felix.
> 
>     [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/its/
> 
> 
>