Notes on Compound Documents

[Paul Antonov <apg@syntext.com>]

Greetings,

to save at least some time during the conference call, here are my notes
and additions to the Compound Documents Statement.

1. Question of terminology (what is "compound document"?) should be put
   first.
2. There is at least four frequenly used patterns which can be called
   "compound documents":

   a) encapsulation of formats (e.g. MathML used within TEI document).
   b) application-specific extensions (e.g. XSLT extensions)
   c) specializations in DITA sense
   d) compound (combined) documents in a sense of DITA maps

For a) and b), namespace mechanism is usually used, and DITA is a poor
choice for this. For c), and d), the DITA is good.

You may ask why DITA is not good for b)? The answer is that in many
existing applications such as XSLT, Schemas, etc. the established way to
do the extensions is the use of another namespace. DITA is good only for
the documents which were DITA from the start.

So, I would like to see something is statement which says more explicitly
and less abstract _what DITA is good for_.

Regards,

-- Paul