I was talking to someone last night and they mentioned that the biggest
use case, and the one that is causing everyone to flock to DITA, for
using DocBook is to take the schema and then customize it.
My first reaction was to think "That's completely crazy. This person is
obviously just a DITA cultist and seeing the world through tinted
lenses." Then the cynic in me piped up and said "People often do crazy
things."
Is this a big use case in the DocBook world? Do organizations start with
standard DocBook and then tweak it around to make some customized
version of the schema that is no longer DocBook?
Why would an organization customize DocBook instead of adopting DITA
which is built with the (almost) requirement that it be customized?
What is the cost of doing the customization?
One of the reasons my group adopted DocBook was that the schema did not
need to be customized. We had to create a few guidelines around using
certain tags, but that was much easier than modifying the schema.
Perhaps in larger groups using the schema to enforce rules is more
desirable.
