Reply To: Reuse from URL

[Derek Read]

In theory, I suppose it could be made to work but support for the HTTP protocol for referencing in DITA is not part of any design in the link-resolution that XMetaL Author Enterprise 6.0 supports (neither during creation, during link-checking or while rendering of referenced content). You could insert such a URI for a conref or other attribute using the Attribute Inspector but you would have to ignore warnings about them not being found when you refresh references.

The other question to raise here is whether this is legal. I don't see anything in the DITA 1.1 specs that says it isn't as they consistently discuss URIs, and your example is a URI, so that would seem to be the case. The examples in the DITA 1.1 specs only give values that look like file system paths. The DITA 1.2 specs now hint (via examples) that HTTP (and specifically HTTP and not others) might also be used.

From what I can tell the DITA OT does not support this type of resolution at this time (I have not dug really far into this though, so that might not be correct). It would make sense for XMetaL Author Enterprise to support any schemes (such as HTTP as in your example) that the DITA Open Toolkit supports. If the DITA OT cannot do anything with a specific URI type that would reduce the usefulness of helping you to build such an attribute value or render its referenced content in the authoring tool.

If we added support for something like this it would have to be for a specific scheme(s) however (since they all communicate differently of course). The most obvious I can think of would be HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. There's a long list here: http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes.html

Sounds like you are tentatively only interested in HTTP.

I will raise this with development.

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