Re: DITA possible for start-up/lone writer?

[John Cornellier <jcornellier -at- abingdon -dot- oilfield -dot- slb -dot- com>]

The two main reasons, as far as I know, to use DITA compared to another 
DTDs are:
* specialization
* topic maps

Specialization: You want to use a widely-adopted standard DTD so that 
you can use off-the-shelf publishing tools. E.g. you define your code 
as, say, codeblock, and have an off-the-shelf processor render it in 
monospace font. If you invent your own tags, then you have to invent 
your own rendering/tranforms/publishing.

But for a DTD to be a "widely adopted standard" it has to be all things 
to all people. So the would have to contain many, many tags. DocBook 
contains an insane number of tags.

DITA's idea is that rather than trying to be all things to all people, 
it is a [relatively] simple easy-to-learn model which is adaptable to 
everyone’s needs.

In DITA this is implemented as specialisation, which is conceptually 
similar to inheritance in the software programming world. To modify 
DITA, you add a tag. With most DTDs, if you add a new tag, and then give 
your resultant XML to someone else, their processors will hit this 
unknown tag and die. But with DITA, when you define a new tag, you not 
only give it a name, but you point to the "base" tag which is your new 
tag's parent.

This way if you throw your XML over the fence to someone, when they hit 
they new unknown tag, there is a behaviour they can revert to. E.g. you 
define a new tag called MyCodeBlock which is based on CodeBlock. If the 
processor's never heard of MyCodeBlock it just processes it like CodeBlock.

Topic maps: here the idea is that rather than having a top-down design 
based on a book, and filling in the bits, you have a bottom-up design 
based on chunks or topics. The topics are then bound together by a 
"topic map" which is something like a book in Framemaker, but more flexible.

Sorry to be wordy, I didn't have time to write the short version.

Broberg, Mats wrote:
>I still don't quite grasp all the hot air with DITA, and what you can
>achieve with DITA that you can't achieve with any other DTD/Schema.
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