Re: [dita] App-specific values for @cascade

This seems like a good idea to me.

Cheers,

E.
—————
Eliot Kimber, Owner
Contrext, LLC
http://contrext.com




On 4/7/14, 3:27 PM, "Robert D Anderson" <> wrote:

>The @cascade attribute coming in DITA 1.3 is a CDATA attribute with 2
>pre-defined values to control how attribute values merge during a cascade
>process.
>
>There was a lot of discussion about making this CDATA to allow for the
>case where applications need to support more conditions than we have now.
>The discussion led to the design points that:
>1. The standard values (merge or nomerge) must come first if using
>multiple values
>2. App-specific tokens must be in upper case, potentially followed by a
>list of affected attributes
>
>A sample would be something like "merge APPTOKEN audience platform".
>
>In the review Chris Nitchie pointed out that this is inconsistent with
>other parts of the spec:
>1. For the chunk attribute, we state that app-specific tokens must begin
>with a prefix, such as app:chunkToken.
>2. If a token in @cascade is followed by a list of attributes, it becomes
>very similar to the groups allowed in property attributes.
>
>Chris and I both agree that this extension mechanism is unlikely to be
>used often, so we should not spend much time worrying about it. At the
>same time, it would be more consistent (and simpler for implementations)
>if we change the syntax of application specific tokens to match similar
>usage elsewhere. This would change the previous example to something more
>like:
>"merge app:token(audience platform)"
>or just
>"merge app:token"
>
>I'd like to propose making this change in response to Chris's review
>comment on the cascade mechanism.
>
>Thanks -
>
>Robert D Anderson
>IBM Authoring Tools Development
>Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)