It makes me nervous to embed HTML-only stuff in the DITA
model.
How do you propose to treat this attribute for print/pdf
output? How do you propose to write up this attribute in the spec in an
output-independent fashion that still remains useful?
paul
From: Erik Hennum [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, 2006 June 06 17:01
To:
Subject: [dita] outputclass on map
elements
Hi, Esteemed Technical Committee:
The 1.1 bug list (http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Bug_fixes_for_DITA_1%2e1#preview)
has an item that never received final disposition -- adding the outputclass
attribute to the map elements (<map>, <topicref>, <navref>,
<anchor>, and <reltable>):
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200602/msg00082.html
To
recap, the outputclass attribute assigns an informal role to an element. As
such, outputclass is quite useful for extending the semantic without formal
specialization. For instance, you can use outputclass to mock up a
specialization in the base document type or to create handles for custom
processing. Typical output processing for HTML copies the outputclass into the
class attribute so users can create custom CSS styling.
Currently,
outputclass is only available on topic elements and not on map elements. As a
result, you can't easily mock up a map specialization or provide handles for
custom map processing.
The main implication of map outputclass for the
base output processing would seem to be to collect the outputclass values for
the topicref and provide them on the outermost wrapper of the HTML content for
the topic. The latter enhancement would let users style a topic in CSS based
on the role played by a topic within a map.
The outputclass attribute
is close to being a universal attribute -- it applies to a similarly large
list of elements and merits similar treatment. I'd like to request that we
finalize this bug fix at the next meeting.
Thanks,
Erik
Hennum
