Re: [dita] Stage one proposal: drop domains (the attribute, not the concept, and only mostly)

6. New item: Some rambling thoughts about the domains attribute
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201701/msg00004.html (Anderson, 4 January 2017)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201701/msg00005.html (Thomas, 4 January 2017)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201701/msg00007.html (Anderson, 4 January 2017)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201701/msg00008.html (Kimber, 4 January 2017)
Robert: The blog post explains the history behind the domains attribute tokens -- what the syntax was and why -- and how they changed over time ... as we came up with new syntax to do everything we wanted to do
Syntax now is messy and complex, they're one of the things that make DITA look hard and complex
There were a whole bunch of theoretical ideas why they might be useful but most of them did not pan out
Bob: My pov is that the utility does not warrant the complexity. Specifically it's insufficient for describing what's going on with constraints; there's not enough syntax to facilitate automated processing
Robert: Plus making it complex enough to handle those cases would make it ridiculously difficult to understand and use
Kris: We've horrifically overcomplicated and overloaded domains over time, especially when we added weak and strong constraints, and later reusing a structural specialization as a domain
Robert: That's when it became impenetrable
Bob: When it jumped the shark
Robert: it's that tail we grew that we no longer need
Chris: The one thing that gives me pause is self-description of profiling attributes. Otherwise I'm completely up for it
Robert: That's why it's not a full-fledged proposal yet. I don't know what the right solution to that is yet.