reaction to LwDITA spec

[Alan Houser <arh@groupwellesley.com>]

I've been following LwDITA for some time. I'm pleased to see the recent 
progress on the spec, and acknowledge that others have put a lot of work 
into it.

But ... I'm starting to see LwDITA as an effort to overload Markdown and 
HTML5 semantics to express (as much as possible) DITA features, more 
than an effort to develop a framework that will support low 
barrier-to-entry DITA authoring, and "easy" interchange between 
Markdown/HTML5 and DITA.

In a vacuum, the effort to replicate DITA features in LwDITA might be 
fine. But an alternative exists today, with full availability of DITA 
features, and a reasonably small (and intuitive, IMO) vocabulary. That 
alternative is the DITA <topic> with the highlighting domain, and the 
DITA <map>. Also available today ... full tools support. (Gotta admit 
that I shudder at the thought of validating, let alone authoring, DITA 
constructs like conrefs, filtering, and keys in Markdown).

Specializing and constraining <topic> to reflect goals of the current 
LwDITA design would be easy. Specifically, I'm thinking of limiting 
mixed content, and specializing new multimedia element types.

I may be all wet here, but I would be curious to know the reaction of 
other TC members to these observations, on this list or in-person at 
DITA North America.

-Alan

--
Alan Houser
Group Wellesley, Inc.
Consultant and Trainer, Technical Publishing
arh on Twitter
412-450-0532