DITA/docbook vs your own schema

[Writer]

And unless you're very clever, it's easy to paint yourself into a corner with an in-house system. It might be "simple" to develop something for what your needs are now, but you neglect to make it open-ended or scalable for whatever changes you need to make in the future.

And then there's portability...

Nadine

>________________________________
> From: Alan Houser <arh at groupwellesley.com>
>To: "framers at lists.frameusers.com" <framers at lists.frameusers.com> 
>Sent: Monday, July 8, 2013 6:50:36 PM
>Subject: Re: DITA/docbook vs your own schema
> 
>
>
>I gotta generally agree with Matt. Occasionally I run into an information modeling project that I can knock off in an afternoon, but that's pretty rare. Remember that you will not only need to model "block" content (topics, headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.), but also tables, cross-references, images, etc. The latter set can be a bit tricky. Plus, oh, your metadata.
>
>With DITA or DocBook, you also get a publishing framework. Also
      usually non-trivial to create from scratch, especially if you are
      publishing to multiple output formats, using filtering, content
      re-use, etc.
>
>I'll mention with some regret that FrameMaker's DocBook support is
      pretty poor. I've never figured out why...the "typical" use cases
      for both (books, PDF) line up very well. It may be a
      chicken-and-egg issue...I suspect more people would use DocBook if
      FrameMaker provided better DocBook support.
>
>-Alan
>
>On 7/8/13 6:31 PM, Matt Sullivan wrote:
>
>A list of what you'll save using DITA or DocBook rather than creating your own schema: 
>>    1. Time
>>    2. Money
>>
>>
>>(Hey, someone had to say it…)
>>
>>-Matt