RE: [docbook-apps] db 5 and Dita anyone?

["Dick Hamilton" <rlhamilton@frii.com>]

Dave,

You make a good point; I suspect Eliot is not familiar with Norm's
article, "DITA for DocBook" (http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/21/dita),
which shows how to specialize DocBook, and provides a customization
to the stylesheets to support specialization.  I posted a reply to
his blog entry suggesting he take a look at it and comment.

The question this does raise is whether it makes sense to include a
means of specialization as part of the standard.  While I like the
idea of being able to specialize, I'm sure that making it a normative
part of the spec is not trivial, even if we simply formalize Norm's
strategy.

I'd be interested in hearing what others on the list think about
formalizing specialization.  To that end, I'm copying this to the
docbook list, which is probably the best place for that discussion.

Dick Hamilton
http://rlhamilton.net


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Pawson [mailto:davep@dpawson.co.uk] 
> Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2008 2:25 AM
> To: Docbook Apps
> Subject: [docbook-apps] db 5 and Dita anyone?
> 
> 
> Eliot is running comments on DITA and docbook when choosing an XML
> vocabulary, concluding
> 
> DITA is the best answer for any XML-based document-centric 
> application 
> I've seen.
> 
http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/2008/04/choosing-xml-schema-docbo
ok-or-dita.html

His last para is interesting.

why doesn't DocBook simply adopt DITA's specialization mechanism? It 
would cost DocBook almost nothing to add and add tremendous value. It 
would not require DocBook changing anything about its current markup 
design, except to possibly back-form some base types that are currently 
not explicit in DocBook but would be useful as a specialization base. 
But that would only make DocBook cleaner.


I'm not a DITA user. It appears Eliot hasn't looked at db5 either.


regards

-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk

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