Processing foreign content

The default behavior for <foreign> is to try to display the content. If the processor cannot render the content, it may emit a warning. The default processing behavior for <unknown> is to suppress.

This section describes processing behaviour of specialized foreign content based on existing standard vocabularies for non-textual content.

Default processing for <foreign>
The enabler of the foreign vocabulary must provide the processing by overriding the base processing for <foreign>.
  • If <foreign> contains more than one alternative content element, they will all be processed. In the case of <desc> they will be concatenated in a similar way to <section> but no title (similar to <div> in HTML).
  • Where appropriate, the specializer may specialize a nested <desc> element to provide alternate content that is valid in the contexts for the <foreign> specialization. If an instance of the <foreign> element doesn't contain a <desc>, <object>, or <image> element, the base processing may emit a warning about the absence of processable content.
  • If the instance of the <foreign> element doesn't contain a <desc>, <object>, or <image> element, the base processing may emit a warning about the absence of processable content.
  • The base processing for <object> can emit the content of <foreign> as a file at the location specified by the data attribute of the <object> element. The <object> element should have a data attribute or an <foreign> sub-element but not both. In the event that an <object> element contains both a data attribute and an <foreign> sub-element the processing system will ignore one of them.
Default processing for <unknown>

The base processing for <unknown> is to suppress unless otherwise instructed.

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OASIS DITA Architectural Specification v1.1 -- Committee Draft 13 February 2007
Copyright © OASIS Open 2005, 2007. All Rights Reserved.