Ha. Well, I wrote the original comment about using DITA and was trying
to get a grasp on the intended nature of the proposed markup. I publish
Help files from DocBook without any problems right now; a <section> *is*
a topic as far as I'm concerned.
I think that how difficult it is to get "acceptable looking" output is
beside the point. There is the XML syntax and then there are the
applications that process it. I prefer to separate the two and decide
what makes logical sense for the markup before then deciding how best to
publish it.
________________________________
From: Bergfrid Skaara [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 4:56 AM
To: Bob Stayton; [email protected]
Subject: Re: DocBook topic element
Hi,
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Bob Stayton <[email protected]>
wrote:
-snip-
You ask "why not just use DITA?". I think there are
going to be lots of answers and discussions about that. Just because
someone wants to set their content up in a modular fashion does not mean
they have to use DITA, if there is a good alternative. This proposal is
for those who want to do modular content but don't need the special
features of DITA, or who prefer to use DocBook markup and stylesheets.
Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
[email protected]
I could not agree more. We want to do modular documentation, and
are required to publish PDFs. Customizing DITA to get decent and
accepptable looking PDFs is extremely hard, and we do not want to
venture down that road. DocBook's stylesheets, the new RelaxNG schemas,
and the solid documentation for customizing them are superior.
As Adobe said when I asked about DocBook 5 support in
FrameMaker: "We have chosen DITA [and abandoned DocBook] because our
focus is light-weight documentation and HTML-publishing."
Best regards,
Bergfrid Skaara
