[oXygen-user] Intelligent editor support for DITA specialisations

[Hedley Finger]

One of the advantages of DITA that was loudly proclaimed is that 
specialised topic files from one creator can be sent to another user and 
inserted into a document /without the specialised DTD being made 
available to that user/.  The DITA OT will then produce some sort of 
readable (if badly formatted) output based on the parent element 
identified in the @class attribute.

But it appears that none of the DITA-out-of-the-box editors which I have 
support specialisation in the absence of the specialisation DTD but barf 
in various interesting ways.  Serna alone appears to make some attempt 
to support specialised elements.

I have made a tiny tweak to <fig> to specialise it with a <credit> 
element based on <p>, and an <anchor> element based on <p>.  This are 
subclassed in the approved manner, e.g. class=" topic/p topic/credit".  
It seems to me that a DITA editor on opening an unknown specialisation 
should be able to look at the inheritance tree in @class and temporarily 
rename the element to the nearest known ancestor.  And, on save, it 
should write out the XML with the original element name restored from 
the leaf value in @class.

As DITA is not a true object model and subclasses are merely renaming of 
ancestor elements for better semantic cueing, this does not appear to be 
a very difficult problem to solve.  Anything would be better than the 
endless bleatings of Xalan error messages!

I am basing my remarks on experience with Syntext Serna, <oXygen/>, 
XMLmind XML Editor (XXE), and FrameMaker v 8 with DITA-FMx 1.0.  Perhaps 
XMetaL, Arbortext Author, and other editors already support this kind of 
compatibility.

Regards,
Hedley

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Hedley Finger

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