So I can better understand your position:
- are you advocating that specializers
should simply be unable to eg make shortdesc required without specialization,
or replace generic elements with more specialized ones, or include only
some elements from a domain?
- or are you advocating that they should
be able to, and we simply accept that constraints will not be recognized
by conref or other dita-aware processes, so if group A imposes a constraint
on their own content there is no way for them to check whether that same
constraint has been applied to the content they want to reuse without human
intervention?
Michael Priestley
Lead IBM DITA Architect
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
"Grosso, Paul"
<>
08/21/2007 03:26 PM
To
<>
cc
Subject
RE: [dita] Groups - Proposal 12008 -
vocabulary and integration constraints (HTML) (IssueConstraints12008.html)
uploaded
From: Michael Priestley [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, 2007 August 21 14:02
To: Eliot Kimber
Cc:
Subject: RE: [dita] Groups - Proposal 12008 - vocabulary and
integration constraints (HTML) (IssueConstraints12008.html) uploaded
I think this is exactly parallel to the domains attribute,
and serves a parallel purpose - communicating constraints
for those processes that care. We've established previously
that you generally don't care, but that others do :-)
We can have yet again the argument about how or why some
companies want to compare constraints when reusing (ie I
want to know if you're allowing things that will blow up
my processor). But we got nowhere last time.
________________________________
Fair enough. So how are we going to get anywhere this time?
Do we just let anyone add any amount of complexity to
the DITA spec because someone thinks it's useful to
some audience (almost anything is going to be [at least
perceived to be] useful to someone in some circumstance)?
Or are we willing to say, some people care about some
things and others don't, but we all care about avoiding
making the DITA standard so complex that it buckles under
its own weight, so we all need to evaluate the cost-benefit
of each proposal, and some of us are going to decide the
cost of added complexity is not worth the benefit *as we
perceive it*, so it is perfectly acceptable to vote against
a given proposal on such grounds?
I fear the road we're on is going to make SGML, HyTime,
DSSSL, FOSI, XML Schema, and XSL-FO all look simple in
comparison (yes, I've worked on all those specs and maybe
it's because I have the scars to prove it that I'm trying
to keep DITA from following in the same path).
paul
