[TriLUG] [Fwd: DocBook and DITA] - & docbook mailing list info

[Mark Johnson]

Hi All,

Found this post on the docbook[1] list this morning - thought some triluggers 
might want to follow the thread, should it develop.

If you're interested in subscribing to a DocBook mailing list, there's more info 
here:
http://www.docbook.org/mailinglist/

[1] Searchable archives are at http://sources.redhat.com/ml/docbook/
     Similarly, searchable archives of the docbook-apps list are here:
     http://sources.redhat.com/ml/docbook-apps/

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	DocBook and DITA
Date: 	Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:57:00 -0700
From: 	Rajal Shah <rajal at meshsoftware.com>
To: 	<docbook at lists.oasis-open.org>
References:
<8B45926190D2834CA1870E3015EED56919E4D8 at midom01.win.magnus.local>
<421366B1.9090105 at kosek.cz> <uwtt8te0r.fsf at gnu.org>
<4213BEA0.4010202 at kosek.cz> <ur7jgtb48.fsf at gnu.org>



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.
--
Rajal


-- 
____________________________________________________________
Mark Johnson      <mrj at debian.org>
Debian XML/SGML:  <http://debian-xml-sgml.alioth.debian.org>
Home Page:        <http://linux.duke.edu/~mark/>
GPG fp: DBEA FA3C C46A 70B5 F120  568B 89D5 4F61 C07D E242