DITA for Docbook

[Sean Wheller]

Some time ago there was discussion about doing topic oriented help. If I 
recall correctly the conversation was started by Matt who wanted to 
implimented a help system that was more oriented along the lines of 'what' 
and 'how' the user needed information and consumed it. The project was forked 
out docteam in baz.

At the time I explained that the technical layer, Docbook, was not suited to 
the approach Matt was proposing and that something like DITA would be more 
appropriate. However that use of DITA and Docbook would result in an 
unreasonable amount of content duplication and therefore a long term 
maintenance overhead for authors and translators. 

I think Matt and I discussed the problem in IRC, it boiled down to the 
position where we wanted the best of both worlds without having to completely 
remake the wheel and still make any modifications technically attainable for 
Yelp in the reasonably near future.

Looks like help may be on the way. Thank you Norman Walsh!!!!!

I think that the adoption of DITA as an OASIS standard and the recent 
progress/developments made in the DITA community make DITA a very attractive 
proposal for allowing us to resuse both the Docbook legacy of our own and 
that of the upstream efficiently and cost-effectively. We need to explore 
this avenue.

For those technically inclined, please note that I am looking in to how we can 
use DITA/DOCBOOK better and who knows merge the results into the docteam 
toolchain and development methodology. 

Perhaps we can help Matt scratch that itch at the same time. Lord knows it has 
been there for months. It must be driving him crazy. So if you are inclined 
to doing some research and development, lemme know. Matt if that itch is 
still there, now may be the time.

Now I only wonder if the Yelp Team can make changes to advance with 
technological change.

Oh, I should say that we would have to move forward to the edge of the XML 
technology churn. If you like it, the instability of the churn, then I would 
say, "Relax NG here we come."

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DITA for DocBook: Implementing the Darwin Information Typing
Architecture for DocBook
Norm Walsh, Blog

DocBook and DITA are competitors, at least to the extent that both are
aimed at the technical documentation market. I think DITA can point to
four technical differences that are arguably features in its favor: (1)
A topic-oriented authoring paradigm. (2) A cross-referencing scheme
that's more practical than XML's flat ID space. (3) SGML's conref,
reinvented; (4) An extensibility model based on specialization...
DocBook's legacy is certainly big, linear documents: it even has the
word 'book' in it's name. But there's nothing that prevents you from
writing modern, topic-oriented, highly modular documentation in DocBook.
Nothing except, perhaps, the emotional weight of the tag names... With
a couple of hours of hacking [using RELAX NG], I've implemented on top
of DocBook the four key features of DITA that I could identify... In
doing so, I've attempted to remain true to the spirit of DocBook, so
my content models aren't exactly the same as the DITA models, but I
think the analogies are sound. That means the choice of which vocabulary
to use, DocBook or DITA, comes down simply to the actual terms in the
vocabulary, the elements and attributes provided, their semantics, and
their relationships to each other.

http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/21/dita
See also the DocBook web site: http://www.docbook.org/

-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
084-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Registered Linux User #375355
http://wenzani.blogspot.com/