At 17:47 2004-07-19 -0500, Paul Grosso wrote:
>At last week's telcon, during the discussion of what table model
>to use in DITA, it was suggested that forcing users to use
>a particular table model will discourage users who are already
>standardized on a different model.
>
>DITA is a DTD, so right off we are constraining users by defining
>a vocabulary they must use. DITA goes to greater extents than
>most other vocabularies to provide a controlled way to extend
>the vocabulary, but within fairly limited bounds that ensure the
>benefits of a known vocabulary are not entirely lost.
>
>DITA's extension mechanism maintains most of the benefits of
>a known vocabulary by ensuring that the XSLT already written
>for the known vocabulary will work for newly defined tags.
>
>Doing something like this for disparate table models would be
>very difficult.
Just to clarify: when I said "doing something like this for
disparate table models" I didn't mean one couldn't use
specialization on table tags.
I meant that one couldn't expect--as one does with specialization--
that one could plug an arbitrary table model into the DITA
vocabulary and have it work in the existing stylesheet and tools.
paul
