Comparing DITA with Alternative Schema

If you’re trying to determine whether the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) may be the right choice for your documentation needs, read Comparison of XML schema for narrative documents, a whitepaper by Andrew Squire and Peter Meyer (Elkera Pty Limited, August 2005). The authors say the purpose of the document “is to identify and compare the key features of four XML DTDs or schema that may be considered as candidates to model a wide range of business, legal and technical documents commonly prepared by business and government enterprises (narrative business documents).”

The authors examine:

• DocBook
• DITA
• XHTML 2.0
• Elkera BNML

The authors point out that while each approach examined in the white paper may “overlap in many respects, each of the four schema is designed with a particular focus. They each have advantages for particular document types and application requirements.”

Why compare other schema with DITA?

According to the authors, “The schema design has major impacts on the cost of application development and on the ease with which authors can create XML content. The aim of this document is to assist technical architects to define their application requirements and identify those schema that are likely to be suitable for more detailed assessment. Due to the complexity of the schema and the wide range of potential user needs, this comparison is not acomprehensive review of each schema. It focuses on particular features relevant to narrative business documents.”