Question of DTDs and CCSs in XML DITA Tool Kit

["Tsao, Scott" <scott.tsao@boeing.com>]

I have received the following inquiry from a colleague:

The Documentation of the DITA Tool Kit appears to rely almost exclusively on DTDs and Cascading Style Sheets. One of our other sources for XML is the XML 1.1 Bible, 3rd Edition by Elliotte Rusty Harold published in 2004. In his chapters on XSLT and XSD he points out the short comings of DTDs and CSS in XML and anticipated that both will be going out of use in favor of XSLT and XSD. With this in mind our development to-date has been exclusively using the new approach. We hoped in this way to take advantage of the benefits of the new technology and avoid the pitfalls of having to switch over at a later date. We are therefore very interested in developing our DITA based documentation using these new approaches.

We would therefore like to procure DITA XML Schemas and Stylesheets that are based on XSLT and XSD in lieu of DTDs and CSSs. This would include documentation based on XSDs and XSLTs.

Is this possible? Who would we contact about this?

Please let me know if you have any recommendations.

Thanks,

Scott Tsao
Information Architect - Associate Technical Fellow
The Boeing Company