RE: [dita] Policy Decision: Loose or Not

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

Time to move the conversation back to Eliot's suggestion for edits that
improve how the compound document type is represented in the 1.1 Spec.

As Eliot points out, a generalized specification offers multiple paths of
opportunity for knowledgeable users, which is the historical reason why it
was in IBM's original donation for the Spec.  It has been incredibly useful
as a migration staging ground, a storage BLOB, for writing the original
developerWorks articles that defined DITA, as a single container for many
kinds of conref targets, and surely much more.  Implementors who care
deeply about using schemas to constrain the authoring options (truly making
the system "damnfoolproof" if that were possible) can easily banish the
ditabase.dtd from their systems, specialize their DTDs to eliminate nesting
options, and more--that is the power of a sufficiently generalized system.
Insofar that the compound document type is already a widely deployed aspect
of DITA's approved design, let's keep the focus on getting to Committee
Draft.

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
Email: dond@us.ibm.com
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-838-8550
T/L: 678-8550

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
   --T.S. Eliot