Handling Attribute Change in DITA Compare
Special case: Some elements are intended to provide hypertext links, to other parts of the document and external resources. In such cases, when changes in the link target attributes cannot be represented, they are propagated to the element level as discussed in the next section on hypertext links.
Hypertext Links
DITA's hypertext link elements, such as the xref
and link
elements, use the href
and/or keyref
attributes to define the target of the link. And use the content of the element to define the links label.
When attribute change can not be represented, changes in hyper text links are handled specially. In this context, changes to the href
or keyref
attributes are propagated up to the element level; i.e. the 'A' and 'B' versions of the link element are represented as being deleted and inserted respectively, as appropriate for the selected output-format.
The full list of 'generalized' elements that are considered to be hypertext link elements are: author
, fragref
, image
, link
, publisher
, source
, synnoteref
and xref
.
Other elements, such as the topicref
and data
elements, also make use of the href
and keyref
attributes. Such elements are intended to represent more than just a hypertext link, and thus are likely to have a significant amount of content. Seeing changes within this content is important, therefore, changes in the href
or keyref
are not propagated to the element level in these cases.