dita — archive

[Jeff Ogden]

My take on this is that you can't impose any minimum required module support. I think this has to work the way a lot of things in the DITA standard work, that implementers need to say that they do and don't support. If they aren't specialization aware and they say they only support a specific list of DITA topic and map document types, I think that that has to be allowed as long as the documents produced are DITA conforming. Or course such an implantation won't meet many people's needs and those people won't choose to use it, but that in and of itself shouldn't make something non-DITA conforming. Here is an example: Image Acme Aircraft Support, Inc. which makes a DITA aware S1000D Editor that supports one specialized map document type, AcmeS1000DMap, and several specialized topic document types, AcmeS1000DTopic1, AcmeS1000DTopic2, .... The Acme Editor will only read and write these document types. It does not process regular DITA maps or topics. The Acme documents are all DITA conforming and can be exchanged with other organizations with or without generalization. I think the Acme Editor can claim to be DITA conforming. -Jeff >