Dec
12
DocBook vs. DITA: Will the real standard please stand up?
filed under documentation standards | posted by Teresa Mulvihill
I have been a documentation specialist for over eleven years and a steadfast supporter of DocBook for over six years. I'd tried my hand at DITA and gave it up as a fad; lots of bells and whistles, but too complicated to integrate. And couldn't DocBook do everything DITA promised anyway?
So when Allette Systems contacted me to speak on XML standards in Sydney Australia, I jumped at the chance to prove to the documentation world just how wonderful DocBook is and how DITA falls short. Fortunately, my in-depth research opened my eyes to the benefits and limitations of both. Are these two seemingly rival standards really that different? My presentation answers this question with comparative examples, and allows you, the audience, to decide for yourselves.
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one comment
Hi Teresa, thank you for your wrap up. Being a DocBook supporter for some years now, I would like to share Norman Walsh's DocBook for DITA tutorial (http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/21/dita), which shows how to implement core concepts of DITA in DocBook 5. Additionally, Syntext Serna is an XML Editor that supports both, DocBook and DITA.