Re: [docbook-tc] align common elements?

[Steven Cogorno <Steven.Cogorno@Sun.COM>]

On Jul 21, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Nancy P Harrison wrote:

>
> Steve,
>
> I must be missing something, but if there were an equivalence between
>
> ul         unorderedlist
> li         listitem
>
> why wouldn't <ul><li>Item 1</li><li>Item 2</li></ul> work in DocBook?


Because you would need the paras too:

<ul><li><p>Item 1</p></li>...


> BTW, While DITA uses <p>, <ul> etc. for paragraph, list etc.  
> elements, it certainly also has restrictions on them that HTML  
> doesn't; new DITA users just have to learn them.  It doesn't seem  
> to have been a real problem.


Right.  But I'm not so much concerned about DITA and DocBook authors  
moving back and forth. I'm thinking about new DocBook users who have  
written in HTML before (who hasn't?) and might be frustrated with the  
names being the same but the behaviors being different.

It seems odd to me that we would be more concerned about interop  
between the relatively small amount of DITA content with DocBook  
compared to the enormous amount of legacy DocBook content that would  
now become incompatible. I know that many documents will need to  
change between 4.X and 5.x based on changes to the content model.   
But by changing these basic elements we're guaranteeing that *all*  
documents will have to be transformed.

But even if we do change the element names, it isn't going to help  
interoperability. Unless the models are identical, the content will  
always need some sort of transformation.

-Steve