Norm Walsh Answers DITA Or Docbook Question

Sun Microsystems DocBook guru Norm Walsh attended the recent DITA 2006 conference in Raleigh, NC. Here’s what Walsh had to say about the event and the DITA versus DocBook argument.

“I only saw a few hours of the DITA conference, but I think it was a good show. I wish I’d seen more. I remain skeptical about some aspects of the DITA vision, but that’s not really important. Reasonable people can disagree about the details. The DITA and DocBook approaches differ

somewhat, and there are a lot of differences down in the details, but I doubt that there’s any significant documentation problem that you could solve with DITA that you couldn’t also solve with DocBook, and vice-versa. So the question of which schema to use isn’t a question

about what one can do and the other can’t. It’s about design patterns, the richness of the vocabulary, the maturity and capability of tools, familiarity, comfort, and other tangible and intangible things. For that reason I think it’s much more useful and interesting to look at the

things DocBook and DITA offer, what they have in common, where they really differ, and what they can learn from each other. Going forward:

1. DITA development may be informed by DocBook’s historical stability and design patterns
2. DocBook development may be informed by DITA’s innovations and design patterns
3. Some documents are topic oriented and some aren’t
4. Transformation may not be the only road to cooperation
5. Cooperation is worth the effort

Read more from Norm Walsh.