RE: Help with Docbook (an alternative)

Subject: RE: Help with Docbook (an alternative)
From: France Baril <France -dot- Baril -at- ixiasoft -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 15:07:55 -0400


Mark, I think we are on the same page. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate.

> I'm curious to know which general advantages you are taking about.
>
> The main advantages I see are:
> Seperate content and presentation.
> Offer search engines based on semantics.
> Recycle content for one or many media.
> Include metadata in content.

All these are advantages that a particular application of XML might exhibit,
or might not, depending on how it was designed.

The general advantages of XML are:

* Easy to define new tagging languages
* Easy to parse and validate
* Easier to build processing tools because pre-built parses and domain
specific programming languages are available.
* Widespread familiarity with the syntax eases learning of specific
solutions.

> I do not feel I loose any of these with DITA, moreover because my
> DTD can be updated in this architecture, I feel I gain
> flexibility. As I just started with it, maybe I am missing an
> important point!?

DITA is not a DTD. It is a system for creating new DTD's by specializing
existing ones. This allows you to use DITA aware processing application
written for the base DTD to process you specialized DTD (though it will
processes it as if it were the base DTD). You can also write processing
applications that borrow processing code from existing applications,
provided both are DITA aware, both are written in XSLT, and both are in the
same specialization hierarchy.

When you commit to DITA, therefore, you are committing to a specific
processing model which may or may not suit your needs.

---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

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