On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 16:34 -0500, Robert D Anderson wrote:

We've talked in the past about having version specific public IDs available in the catalog, but we would also have the version-agnostic version. The ID with no version would always point to the latest set of document types. This allows users to update their DTDs without having to update the DOCTYPE in their files.

Of course, that particular concern is only a worry for the actual DTD files, not for the modules. So, I'm not sure if we want the modules to use public IDs with versions. My guess would be no, for consistency... but are there any other opinions?

Hi,

IMHO, each DTD and module version should have its own version number in the PUBLIC ID. This is the standard procedure that you can find in other XML vocabularies, like DocBook.

DTDs and catalogues are different things. Lazy users can play with their catalogues and make them point to the latest version without updating DOCTYPE declarations in their documents, but people dealing with different versions should be able to differentiate them in a catalogue.

FWIW, I found the problem while preparing my main catalogue to handle DITA 1.0 and DITA 1.1 at the same time. I expect user of my tools to have DITA 1.0 files, DITA 1.1 files and also their own customisations of DITA. My programs should be able to resolve the right entities and now the entity resolver cannot differentiate between DITA 1.0 and DITA 1.1 because the DTDs have the same PUBLIC IDs .

Please keep in mind that not only technical writers deal with DITA files. I work with translation tools and for my company it is important to handle any official version of DITA, without asking translators (our end users) that know nothing about DTDs and catalogues to tweak configuration files every time they get a DITA document to translate.

I think that this issue needs to be carefully reviewed.