Paul Grosso asked me to comment on this
proposal when it first came up for discussion two and a half weeks or so ago.
It took me a little while to get around to writing something down and a little
longer to get to the point where I could post to the list myself. Sorry for the
delay.
My first reaction to this proposal was
that it was making a part of the DITA specification that is already pretty
complicated and probably not all that well understood by many people even more
complicated. I still have that concern and I’ll write a separate note
about that since I think my concern is really more about the complexity and
size of the DITA specification as a whole and not really about the additional
complexity added by this specific proposal.
My second reaction was that I didn’t
understand the discussion about “constraints” and wondered if this
was a new capability. After reading the proposal over a few more times I think
I figured out that the business about constraints isn’t anything new and
in fact there aren’t really any constraints imposed by the relcolspec or
at least not any constraints that are enforced. Rather than constraints
the relcolspec might be viewed as providing a hint to an author about how the
column in the reltable is to be used. Is my newfound understanding correct?
Today the attributes on the relcolspec as
well as the metadata elements included within any topicmeta group that is
included in the relcolspec are used to provide inherited values for items in
the relcells of the particular column. This inheritance is the same as
the inheritance of attribute values and metadata that occurs elsewhere within a
DITA map.
The proposal calls for the addition of
topicref to the content model of relcolspec. This would provide a feature
somewhat similar to the inheritance that already exists for topicmeta. It
is different in that topicrefs themselves aren’t inherited elsewhere in
DITA documents, although some of their attributes might be. Is this
difference OK? Is there a need to merge attribute values from a topicref
in a relcolspec with attribute values on a matching topicref that appears
explicitly in a relcell in a fashion similar to what would be done for
topicmeta information that is given in both places?
I am less clear about including the data
and data-about elements in the content model for relcolspec. Is this just a
matter of copying the data and data-about elements from the relcolspec into the
relcell during processing in a manner that is like what is done for topicmeta
and which might be done for topicref or is there more to it than that? Is
there a need to merge matching data or data-about elements in some fashion?
Are data and data-about inherited elsewhere within DITA documents? Are data and
data-about anything more than additional types of metadata? And if so, could
these elements or specializations more simply be included within topicmeta
rather than directly within relcolspec?
There is a comment that says: “Base processing could also use the title
of the first topic from the <relcolspec> as the label for the grouped
related links from the column in the output for each topic referenced in other
columns.” I guess
I’m not sure why just the title form the first topicref would be used.
And is this the actual title from the topic that is referenced or the value of
the navtitle attribute on the topicref? Providing a way to specify the
label to use for a related link group seems like a good idea, but is using a title
from a topicref the right way to do this? Would a topichead element work
for this as well or better? Or would allowing a title element to appear within
a relcolspec be a more straight forward approach?
There is a note that says: “The specification might also consider
whether a <data> element in a relcell would distribute to other columns
in the same row (providing a horizontal equivalent to this vertical
distributive capability).” This seems sort of vague. Is the proposal to add this
capability? If this were done, would this just be adding the ability to
specify defaults from cell to cell within a row or is something more implied? Would
this just work for data elements in the first column? Is it controlled by
the collection-type attribute or some other mechanism? Is this really
looking for a relrowspec element to play the same role for rows as relcolspec
does for columns?
-Jeff
From: Erik Hennum
[mailto:]
Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2007 8:47
PM
To:
Subject: [dita] Proposal 12048 -
expanded header for reltable
Hi,
Esteemed TC:
I've updated the reltable header proposal to clarify the potential use of the
<relcolspec> topic for labelling related link groups:
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/24558/IssueReltableHeader12048.dita
A formatted version of the DITA proposal is appended to this note. The change
to the existing proposal is only a light one. Please let me know if you feel
the addition doesn't reflect the discussion.
Hoping that's interesting,
Erik Hennum
(See attached file:
IssueReltableHeader12048.html)
