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Subject: RE: [dita] Re: Comparison between DITA and S1000D
Eliot, Thanks for helping me understand your view. I tend to agree with you that this "specialization-based mechanism" should benefit the XML community well beyond the "tech pub" community, and it seems to be the major differentiator between DITA and S1000D as far as "architecture" is concerned. Regards, Scott -----Original Message----- From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@innodata-isogen.com] Sent: Monday, August 23, 2004 2:42 PM To: Tsao, Scott Cc: dita@lists.oasis-open.org; ehunnum@us.ibm.com; john_hunt@us.ibm.com Subject: Re: [dita] Re: Comparison between DITA and S1000D Tsao, Scott wrote: > As John said: "Modeling all of the details of S1000D with DITA topic > and domain specializations would be a large task," are you suggesting > that one could potentially reap the benefits of the second without > doing the first? > > Am I interpreting your comments correctly? Yes. One could get all the benefits of a generic and powerful specialization mechanism independent of the DITA vocabulary. S1000D stands as typical example of many existing XML applications that are both closely adapted to a particular task (e.g., aircraft maintenance) and that reflect a long history of development and practice that has informed the details of the application: element type and attribute names, content model patterns, linking constructs, and so on. In addition, it almost certainly has a large body of supporting infrastructure tightly bound to those names. Because all of this work was done before DITA was widely known it is highly likely that many aspects of the application will not be directly consistent with the DITA constraints. Thus while it is almost certainly the case that S1000D could be replaced with an equivalent DITA-based application, largely because all technical documentation is essentially the same. But whether it would actually be of advantage to the S1000D community to do so is an open question. But it is also clear that *every* community of non-trivial size that tries to do XML-based interchange needs a specialization mechanism exactly like the one DITA defines. Therefore it is almost certainly the case that *every XML application currently in use* would benefit from adding a means to do controlled specialization. Therefore it is almost certainly the case that the S1000D application (and more importantly, the community of S1000D users) would benefit from being able to do controlled specialization. One way to look at this is: 1. What is the likelihood that S1000D data would need to be interchanged or processed outside of an S1000D context but within a DITA-based context? 2. In the case that such interchange is required, is doing an S1000D-to-DITA transform sufficient? If the interchange is does not involve feedback (no round tripping required) then transform-based interchange is indicated because it is clearly much cheaper to implement a transform than to re-engineer an entire community. If the interchange requires round tripping, then the cost of doing transform-based round tripping must be evaluated against the cost of retrofitting the S1000D community to a DITA-based S1000D. Cheers, Eliot -- W. Eliot Kimber Professional Services Innodata Isogen 9390 Research Blvd, #410 Austin, TX 78759 (512) 372-8122 eliot@innodata-isogen.com www.innodata-isogen.com
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