DITA 1.2 Feature Request: Support for Indirect Addressing

As DITA is as much about authoring as it is about delivery, DITA, unlike
delivery-specific formats such as HTML or XSL-FO, must address the needs
of managing links and addresses in an environment where the many
components that make up a single logical unit of publication will have
independent life cycles and often multiple versions in time that must be
maintained and be processible in the appropriate context.

In particular, it is not practical, in the general case, to manage
addresses as documents change over time without some form of indirect
addressing or the imposition of severe (and otherwise unnecessary)
constraints on how documents are stored and managed.

Currently, all DITA addresses are hard, direct pointers to their
targets. Because DITA 1.x defines its own syntax and semantics for all
addressing of DITA-defined components, it is not possible to
unilaterally impose a existing indirection mechanism such as XIndirect
(http://www.w3.org/TR/XIndirect/).

Proposal:

Define a DITA-specific address indirection element with the simple
semantic of "indirect through me to my target" (cf., the