Request to add effectivity attribute

[Steve Cogorno <Steven.Cogorno@Sun.Com>]

Members of the TC:

We've recently found that the effectivity attributes are not quite enough to 
differentiate between some of the platform and architecture combinations that 
wee need to support.  Sun would like to request an addition to the effectivity 
attributes in order to identify this content.

We currently use OS and Arch to label text for our different platforms and
operating systems.  In the past we've used the OS attribute to differentiate
32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. However this isn't really the correct
place for 32/64 bit.  As our list of operating systems and architectures the
permutations are too complex for the existing attributes.

We'd like to propose the addition of a new attribute called wordsize that
would indicate the word size for the architecture.

Here is an example of our attribute values:


OS                  Arch                WordSize

Solaris             SPARCv9             32
HP-UX               AMD                 64
Windows             x86
Linux               PowerPC-403
                    MIPS


While I hesitate to add a new attribute, the only alternative is for us to
cram the word size into the existing attributes:


OS                  Arch

Solaris             SPARCv9
Solaris-32          SPARCv9-32
Solaris-64          SPARCv9-64
HP-UX               AMD
HP-UX-32            AMD-32
HP-UX-64            AMD-64
Windows             x86
Windows-32          x86-32
Windows-64          x86-64
Linux               PowerPC-403
Linux-32            PowerPC-403-32
Linux-64            PowerPC-403-64
                    MIPS
                    MIPS-32
                    MIPS-64


This alternative can lead to ambiguous markup and confusing generated text. 
We'd like to avoid that by using a third attribute.


If you have any comments on this proposal please let me know.

Thanks!


Steve Cogorno
Sun Microsystems