Fwd: New potential to bring up rebasing DITA on HTML

[Don R Day <donrday@contelligencegroup.com>]

What I wrote to Michael seems general enough to resend as is to the TC list:

I have been looking at this mechanism as a potential specialization 
mechanism for use in the DITA 2.0 timeframe:
http://gaslight.co/blog/roll-your-own-html5-web-components-with-vanilla-js
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webcomponents/customelements/

Rather than using XML design patterns, this approach is fully about the 
Web Way of doing business. From our point of view, the design pattern 
for specialization simply moves from the schema side of the architecture 
into the imports function of Web Components. If we can find a way to 
bind the two patterns, content produced in a Web-only shop should be 
interoperable with conventional DITA based processes. Why DITA 2.0? If 
this is actually feasible, we might finally be able to fulfill the Erik 
Hennum vision for rebasing DITA on HTML, which I still find to be 
appealing--particularly for providing DITA with a long enough runway to 
actually persist in a post-XML world (ref. 
http://blog.jclark.com/2010/11/xml-vs-web_24.html?m=1 ). My greatest 
fear for DITA's current track is that the present scope of use 
continually moves it further and further from being a direct-use format. 
lwDITA effectively intercepts that problem for a short time, but I'm 
concerned that the architecture still allows introducing processing 
dependencies that would move some content built in that space into 
processing-dependent modality again--basically binding the use of that 
content back to the juggernaut systems and editors that I fear will 
discourage web developers from adopting.

Web Components are also responsible for promoting the all-javascript 
replacement for the DOM--the phenomenon ISTR has been called "page full 
of empty divs" where little content is actually queriable in the 
page--it's just used to paint glyphs on the canvas. This proposal may 
give the node.js world a reason to use that extensibility as intelligent 
source rather than just as pigment.

In a sense, providing a social life for DITA may be an important factor 
for its evolutionary survival beyond the techcomm-nurtured era.