I doubt they would want to change at this point either. It's a shame they weren't thinking about interoperability when they started them, though. Especially when DITA had the choice between IBM IDDoc and DocBook, and in many cases chose the IBM IDDoc names...
I was just pondering the opportunity to make backwards incompatible changes in V5. I guess what we still need is to develop a good mapping between the standards.
Thanks for your thoughts on this...
--Scott
Jirka Kosek wrote:
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
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