Re: [dita] Namespaces and Schemas: Some Initial Findings and XSLTImplications

Eliot Kimber <> wrote on 06/29/2004 01:52:12 PM:

> This means that the relevant schema awareness is provided entirely in 

> the initial parsing and does not require any schema awareness in the 

> XSLT engine itself.

Good job! But I worry that not every user is going to understand how to do the same things with their processing environment.  One of my strong desires is that DITA processing remain easy to do with off-the-shelf/off-the-web tools with little or no installation tinkering.  Will these considerations impact the use of Ant and other tools that also call the built-in Xalan?  That is, have you taken a step down a road that prereqs all other tools to work with Saxon only?

> I also realized that one must namespace qualify the attributes as well 

> as the tag names in match statements, e.g.:

> 

> <xsl:template match="dbase:*[contains(@dbase:class,' topic/titlealts ')]"/>

> 

> So I am satisfied that moving to a schema-only approach would not 

> prevent people from using common tools and the existing XSLTs with 

> namespaces added.

Doesn't this prevent using the same transfroms for DTD-based processing?  Again, I see a polarization forming of tools/docs that only work with Schemas, and that are not fully interoperable with DTD-based content and processors.  The IBM tools team has seen this coming for awhile, and haven't seen any easy answers here.  It looks like the jump from DTDs to Schemas will still touch everything, docs and tools alike, however minor.  "Why can't we all just get along?"

Besides (can't help myself), that global search and replace is so... debasing.

> Instances require only that the DITA namespace be declared as the root 

> namespace, which requires modifying only the root tag and no others, so 

> the impact on existing bodies of DITA documents is about as low as it 

> can be and still require some modification.

On the transforms side, couldn't you just declare the namespace in the <xsl:stylesheet> element and let the otherwise un-prefixed elements and attributes in the transform instance inherit the parent namespace?

Regards,

--

Don Day <>

Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee

IBM Lead DITA Architect

11501 Burnet Rd., MS 9037D018, Austin TX 78758

Ph. 512-838-8550   (T/L 678-8550)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

        --T.S. Eliot