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Subject: URIs and versions
I didn't catch the exact details of our plans for URIs during the telcon, but I do remember discussing getting the version info in there. I remember related discussions in the W3C and elsewhere, so I did some checking and talking to others. For organizing the various DTD and/or XML Schema modules and shells and such, having the version as a step in the path usually works well. It occurs to me that we might want to have both XML Schemas and DTDs for DITA at some point. DocBook, which is in a similar situation (and in fact also has SGML DTDs and RelaxNG grammars) uses a scheme can be seen at http://docbook.org/xml/ Our analogy might be something like: http://dita.oasis-open.org/xml/1.0/the-various-modules-etc The "xml" step--which implies XML DTDs--allows us later to have an "xsd" subtree containing schemas and so forth. All the above is about URIs for organizing the files, aka system identifiers. As far as namespace names, there are problems with putting the version into the namespace name. I'm not sure if that was what was being discussed today or not, but if it was, we might want to continue the discussion. If you put the version into the namespace name, then you are putting all your elements into a completely different vocabulary every version which makes it very difficult to transition from one version to the next. This practically guarantees serious legacy conversion problems whenever one wants to transition to a new version. None of your XSLT stylesheets that work with the old namespace will work on any elements in the new namespace. Unless we really want to enforce that "a topic in DITA 1.0" is a completely different and incompatible object compared to "a topic in DITA 1.1", then I don't think we want to have the version info in the namespace name. Instead, applications that need to know the version of a given bit of content should inspect the DTDArchVersion attribute and/or some similar version attribute we may wish to add to all root elements. But we should have a version-less namespace for DITA. This is somewhat analagous to the fact that all XHTML--whether strict or loose and regardless of version--uses the same http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace name [1] so that a <p> element is always a <p> element regardless of the details of the version of the document it's in. (The "1999" is NOT any kind of version indicator--it is merely the way the W3C doles out namespace names.) paul [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#normative
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