dita-lightweight-dita — archive

[Alan Houser]

I've been following LwDITA for some time. I'm pleased to see the recent progress on the spec, and acknowledge that others have put a lot of work into it. But ... I'm starting to see LwDITA as an effort to overload Markdown and HTML5 semantics to express (as much as possible) DITA features, more than an effort to develop a framework that will support low barrier-to-entry DITA authoring, and "easy" interchange between Markdown/HTML5 and DITA. In a vacuum, the effort to replicate DITA features in LwDITA might be fine. But an alternative exists today, with full availability of DITA features, and a reasonably small (and intuitive, IMO) vocabulary. That alternative is the DITA <topic> with the highlighting domain, and the DITA <map>. Also available today ... full tools support. (Gotta admit that I shudder at the thought of validating, let alone authoring, DITA constructs like conrefs, filtering, and keys in Markdown). Specializing and constraining <topic> to reflect goals of the current LwDITA design would be easy. Specifically, I'm thinking of limiting mixed content, and specializing new multimedia element types. I may be all wet here, but I would be curious to know the reaction of other TC members to these observations, on this list or in-person at DITA North America. -Alan -- Alan Houser Group Wellesley, Inc. Consultant and Trainer, Technical Publishing arh on Twitter 412-450-0532