DocBook and DITA

["Rajal Shah" <rajal@meshsoftware.com>]

I was amazed and frustrated to hear people downplaying Docbook over DITA at a conference I attended this week on XML documentation and CMS.

 

I figure this group would be the ideal place to pose this question:

 

1. What is the opinion on DITA?

 

2. Does DITA share inline elements at least with Docbook? (para, bullets etc.) What is the point in redefining those in DITA again if they were already done in DOCBOOK and since both of these standards are part of OASIS.

 

3. DITA has this inheritance concept and base their stylesheet templates of the class attribute instead of the element name in the source.. That way you can share the XSl and XSL-FO of the parent element even if you customize/specialize the class. That does sound like a good concept.. What do people think about it? Does DOCBOOK have anything similar to it?

 

4. DITA has limited support for XSDs and no suppport for RelaxNG.. They are still in the DTD world. I've initiated the schema technology thread a couple of months back on this mailing list and we all universally agreed that DOCBOOK recommends the newer technologies.. DITA was strongly advocating just the opposite at the conference.. Any comments?

 

Regards.

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Rajal