DITA for DocBook

If you line DocBook and DITA up, I think DITA can point to four technical differences that are arguably features in its favor.

Walsh, Norman. DITA for DocBook. Articles>Information Design>DocBook>DITA

A DocBook Basics and References

DocBook is an easy-to-understand and widely used DTD. Dozens of organizations use DocBook for millions of pages of documentation, in various print and online formats, worldwide.

Walsh, Norman. dpawson.co.uk (2004). Books>Information Design>XML>DocBook

DocBook: The Definitive Guide  

This book is designed to be the clear, concise, normative reference to the DocBook DTD. This book is the official documentation for the DocBook DTD.

Walsh, Norman and Leonard Muellner. Docbook.org (2003). Books>Documentation>XML>DocBook

Getting Started with SGML/XML

This chapter is intended to provide a quick introduction to structured markup (SGML and XML). If you're already familiar with SGML or XML, you only need to skim this chapter. To work with DocBook, you need to understand a few basic concepts of structured editing in general, and DocBook, in particular. That's covered here. You also need some concrete experience with the way a DocBook document is structured.

Walsh, Norman and Leonard Muellner. O'Reilly and Associates (1999). Articles>Documentation>Standards>XML

Introducing DocBook

Structured documentation is semantic, rather than presentational. Components have identifiable structure. HTML and Word are somewhat structured. DocBook is strictly structured.

Walsh, Norman. NWalsh.org (2001). Presentations>Documentation>Standards>DocBook

XML: One Input, Many Outputs  

Hillesund (2002) argues that XML does not and cannot fulfil the often touted benefit that it allows authors and publishers to create documents that can be effectively presented in a variety of formats; that the 'doctrine of 'one input â*” many outputs' ... is basically wrong.' This Letter defends the position that XML is an effective technology, in fact the most effective technology in widespread use, for producing multiple output formats from a single input document.

Walsh, Norman. Journal of Digital Information (2003). Articles>Web Design>XML

Unit Testing in XSLT 2.0

One of the tenets of modern software design is that early and frequent testing is a key contributor to successful application development. Unit testing frameworks, tools designed to ease the development and execution of unit tests, exist for many programming languages. This paper discusses how unit testing can be applied to the development of stylesheets and describes a testing framework for XSLT 2.0 unit tests.

Walsh, Norman. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Endless Possibilities: Norm Walsh on the Changing Nature of Publishing

Why XML documents aren’t a good fit for relational databases, how university professors are creating custom text books for students, and find links to several innovative projects that are demonstrating the power of XML and its cousin XQuery.

Walsh, Norman and Scott Abel. Content Wrangler, The (2009). Articles>Interviews>Information Design>XML