And unless you're very clever, it's easy to paint yourself into a corner with an in-house system.?It might be "simple" to develop something for what your needs are now, but you neglect to make it open-ended or scalable for whatever changes you need to make in the future.
And then there's portability... Nadine >________________________________ > From: Alan Houser <arh at groupwellesley.com> >To: "framers at lists.frameusers.com" <framers at lists.frameusers.com> >Sent: Monday, July 8, 2013 6:50:36 PM >Subject: Re: DITA/docbook vs your own schema > > > >I gotta generally agree with Matt. Occasionally I run into an information >modeling project that I can knock off in an afternoon, but that's pretty rare. >Remember that you will not only need to model "block" content (topics, >headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.), but also tables, cross-references, images, >etc. The latter set can be a bit tricky. Plus, oh, your metadata. > >With DITA or DocBook, you also get a publishing framework. Also ??????usually non-trivial to create from scratch, especially if you are ??????publishing to multiple output formats, using filtering, content ??????re-use, etc. > >I'll mention with some regret that FrameMaker's DocBook support is ??????pretty poor. I've never figured out why...the "typical" use cases ??????for both (books, PDF) line up very well. It may be a ??????chicken-and-egg issue...I suspect more people would use DocBook if ??????FrameMaker provided better DocBook support. > >-Alan > >On 7/8/13 6:31 PM, Matt Sullivan wrote: > >A list of what you'll save using DITA or DocBook rather than creating your own >schema: >>????1. Time >>????2. Money >> >> >>(Hey, someone had to say it?) >> >>-Matt
