microXML and the future of DITA

["Don Day (LbW)" <donday@learningbywrote.com>]

This appears to be an emerging standards discussion that will make future use of Web standards in DITA dicey if not managed reasonably:

http://blog.jclark.com/2010/12/microxml.html (and check the follow-up post as well)

For one, it would be nice if future HTML5 editors that were also microXML compliant could actually support DITA topic authoring. Likewise, it would be nice if HTML5 could evolve to support a default "topic" that DITA 2.0 could live with as a common base type. It would be nice if class-based extension could be retained, of course, although how we'd use that without a DTD or Schema beats me--I think specialized content literally on the Web is doomed outside of XML 1.0. Finally, it would be nice if microXML would support a formal content reference mechanism so that conref and topicref processing ideals could be used to aggregate content dynamically--I don't see anything in James's discussion that supports that use of microXML.

Have any of the DITA TC  been party to this discussion on the XML-dev list? I'm thinking that creating a liaison/intervention with the W3C might be useful for the DITA TC at this point, at least so that we can ensure some degree of common architecture when the DITA 2.0 effort begins. What do you think?

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Don R. Day

DITA and XML Consultant, 512 244-2868
Co-Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

--T.S. Eliot