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Subject:Re: DTD for mechanical engineering? From:"Michael Priestley" <mpriestl -at- ca -dot- ibm -dot- com> To:"techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 20 Aug 2003 13:01:27 -0400
Jan Henning writes:
>On first glance, DITA appears to be a general documentation framework,
>similar to DocBook. As such, it is likely not suitable for our project
>without customization.
>
>We will look at DITA if no industry-specific DTD is available. For the
>time being, we will not investigate DITA in depth. (Unless somebody
>points out that we misunderstood the purpose :-)
I'll just add that it is intended for customization, through a mechanism
called specialization that lets you define new document types as deltas
against the existing types, with full reuse of existing output transforms.
You can also tweak the output transforms, overriding specific behaviors
while sharing common ones.
In other words, DITA lets you create industry-specific DTDs fairly quickly,
immediately get output, and continue to share common output logic (like
transforming to HTML, PDF, resolving and validating links, etc.) across
industries, while tweaking the output for industry-specific differences.
So if you don't find an existing DTD and transforms that suit your needs,
specializing DITA lets you avoid reinventing the whole wheel (you only need
to invent the spokes that are unique to your industry).
