Reply To: Publish of ditamap changes topicref href=…xml scope="external" to href=…html

[Derek Read]

— Good catch gcrews, I was unable to find a matching defect at SourceForge.

I think my other concerns are still valid however, and might come into play here, namely: What do you intend for the reader of your documentation to do with the XML file? That would still be a driving factor for me.

If the answer is that you don't care what happens, you simply want the reader to be able to navigate to it as a separate file (and let the browser decide what it does with it) then using a newer version of the OT is the solution. My opinion is that the last solution I offered (display the XML inline inside a topic) is the best one (it would be for any cases I can think of but I don't have all the details).

Yet another option would be to provide your XML file compressed into a ZIP file or other archive format you intend your readers to have a tool for dealing with (all current versions of Windows include unZIP capabilities).

Note that the only way to obtain DITA OT 1.5 for use with XMetaL Author Enterprise 6.0 is to obtain a copy of the “DITA 1.2 Configuration Kit” (that installer bundles and properly installs it integrated with XMetaL). However, installing the “Configuration Kit” also enables the DITA 1.2 DTDs by default. DITA 1.1 and 1.0 can still be configured but that would be one more step. Note as well that we consider this “Configuration Kit” beta software (similar but far superior capabilities will be included with our next official release).

The alternative is to wait for the next release (7.0) which will include the most recent version of the DITA OT included with what we ship.

If you are using a CMS and it has the ability to generate output using the DITA OT you may ask the CMS vendor to help you upgrade the version of the DITA OT  installed on the CMS server.

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