RE: [dita-adoption] Question of DTDs and CCSs in XML DITA Tool Kit

Subject: RE: [dita-adoption] Question of DTDs and CCSs in XML DITA Tool Kit

The DITA Toolkit includes both schemas and DTDs for DITA 1.1. Both should be completely equivalent at this point. The DITA TC produces both a DTD and Schema implementation of the standard, and users can pick which one to use.

The draft DITA 1.2 DTDs are very nearly solid; the schemas have a bit more work to go, but the two will again be equivalent by the time DITA 1.2 is approved. The latest version of DITA 1.2 schemas and DTDs both ship in the demo folder of the latest DITA-OT test build.

While the toolkit does include CSS files that can be used to style DITA content directly, that is not how we generally expect people to render DITA content. As far as I know, the most common method for rendering DITA with the toolkit is to use the provided XSLT files. There are really two stages to any DITA build. First, there is a series of pre-processing routines (such as conref, and the step that adds map based links into topics); those steps are written in XSLT or Java, depending on what works best for each stage. Next, there is the rendering portion, where the DITA content is rendered as XHTML, PDF, or other format - that step is generally written in XSLT for every output format, with the caveat that anybody can create a new Toolkit plugin to produce output using whatever language they want.

Using CSS to render DITA content directly typically will not handle resolution of conref or the other items you get from pre-processing, and is really most useful for a preview display. If you run a normalization build to resolve all of the pre-processing, then you can use CSS on that "Normalized DITA", but you're right that the XSLT route still gives more control and more power for final display.

In addition, these are a couple of comments regarding the differentiating factors between DITA DTD and XSD:

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

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