TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
I have tried translating my doc to XML with the docbook DTD. As many of you said, the tag set is huge, which is not such a big problem as you can decide to use your own subset. An other problem is that many tags useful to my specific documents were missing... Adding new tags is a solution. It defeats some of the ideas behind docbook, which is to have a std and to be able to send information people can read in their preferred customized layout.
I have found another alternative: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It is a documentation architecture proposed by IBM. I am in trial period with this new architecture and DTD, but for now it seems to me like a flexible solution as it has been created to be extended and customized. Moreover, it promotes the development of modular documentation, which is great for reference documentation, it forces writers to group information so that every section presents a concept or procedure that stands on its own, in other words, it helps to create non-linear documentation and therefore single sourcing.
I wish I could tell you more, but I've had to put my transition project on the ice until fall as I am preparing documentation for a coming release and my TW collegue is on a maternity leave.
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