Re: [docbook-tc] align common elements?

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Scott Hudson wrote:

> just a thought about interoperability between DocBook, DITA and ODF:
> do we want to consider changing some of the tag names in V5 to align some of the 
> more common element names? Some likely candidates I can think of would include: 
> para, itemizedlist, orderedlist, listitem.

That seems like a quite radical change and I'm completely against it for 
many reasons.

> It would be nice if we could align some of the common elements into a separate 
> commonElements.mod or something that all three standards could incorporate, 
> making it easier to copy content between the three standards without having to 
> transform a lot of the common markup. 

You have to run transformation anyway because there are much bigger 
problems than element names. Suppose DITA listitem:

<li>apple</li>

even if DocBook would use <li> instead of <listitem> you must transform 
document to add enclosing paragraph, because DocBook schema doesn't 
allow mixed content on listitem level.

Moreover DocBook V5 uses namespace, so element names will be different 
even if local names would be the same.

I also do not think that ODF will change its element names few months 
after being approved OASIS and ISO standard.

And if someone should align element names, then it should be DITA and 
ODF because DocBook is the oldest markup from those three vocabularies ;-)

			Jirka

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
   Jirka Kosek     e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz     http://www.kosek.cz
------------------------------------------------------------------
   Profesionální školení a poradenství v oblasti technologií XML.
      Podívejte se na náš nově spuštěný web http://DocBook.cz
        Podrobný přehled školení http://xmlguru.cz/skoleni/
------------------------------------------------------------------
                    Nejbližší termíny školení:
     ** XSLT 23.-26.10.2006 ** XML schémata 13.-15.11.2006 **
      ** DocBook 11.-13.12.2006 ** XSL-FO 11.-12.12.2006 **
------------------------------------------------------------------
   http://xmlguru.cz    Blog mostly about XML for English readers
------------------------------------------------------------------

S/MIME Cryptographic Signature