🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Scott;

      So .. you're trying to insert each "Widget" into a data model of your
      own that acts as a container for each basic widget description plus a
      more verbose description. You're not trying to stuff additional data into
      the base MakeWidget model, right?




Close enough. And yup, I'm pretty sure I can do this with DITA and conrefs... except for that fact that the "MakeWidget" tool the engineers must use won't accept DITA.

See my footnote. DITA is TW oriented and High Tech XML formats are eng driven. The engineers must use their own non-DITA XML structure in order to make Widgets. This is a hard constraint. So either you don't use DITA or you constantly swap between eng XML and DITA - extremely hard to do - and track info in 2 places. Also hard to do.

IMHO, this is one of the fundamental flaws of DITA. Raw engineering XML contains usable doc info . Thus, the future of reuse is databases between engineer and TW, not databases between TW and TW. An eng datum is a TW doc.

There's probably a paper in there somewhere, but "Why I hate DITA" may get me shot at STC conferences and I like living... ;)

See also XLink, Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and Transclusion for those interested in related topics.

David Blyth (the UNIX and vi dinosaur)
Staff Technical Writer
QCT Division
QUALCOMM - Standard Disclaimers Apply

Only 149,999,950 more years of Ruling The Earth to go
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