I was thinking that some of the more common elements/structures would have some benefit to being interchangeable. Perhaps at this point, the differences in content models prevent that and we just have to look to mapping the transformations...
--Scott
Steven Cogorno wrote:
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
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