How does DITA differ from DocBook?
It’s important to recognize that DocBook and DITA take fundamentally different approaches. DocBook was originally designed for a single, continuous technical narrative (where the narrative might be of article, book, or multi-volume length). Through transforms, DocBook can chunk this technical narrative into topics to provide support for Web sites and other information sets. Because the goal of the DocBook DTD is to handle all standard requirements for technical documentation, the usage model encourages customization to exclude elements that aren’t local requirements. The usage model supports but discourages local extensions because of the potential for unknown new elements to break tool support and interoperability. By contrast, DITA was designed for discrete technical topics. DITA collects topics into information sets, potentially using filtering criteria. The core DITA information types are not intended to cover all requirements but, instead, provide a base for meeting new requiremen
Contributing author: IBM Date: August 8, 2006 DocBook and DITA take fundamentally different approaches. DocBook was originally designed for a single, continuous technical narrative, where the narrative might be an article, book, or multivolume length. Through transforms, DocBook can “chunk” this information into topics to provide support for websites and other information sets. Because the goal of the DocBook DTD is to handle all standard requirements for technical documentation, the usage model encourages customization to exclude elements that aren’t local requirements. The usage model supports but discourages local extensions because of the potential for unknown new elements to break tool support and interoperability. By contrast, DITA was designed for discrete technical topics. DITA collects topics into information sets, potentially using filtering criteria. The core DITA information types are not intended to cover all requirements, but rather to provide a base for meeting new requi
