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Hello All, I've been working on DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) XML Schemas internally at IBM for a number years and with DITA TC since it inception. Although, DTDs are still very much the norm in the documentation world, DITA has had an XML Schema version for a few years. The XML editor Syntext Serna has made use of those schemas for couple of releases. I've had my share of frustrations trying to implement the DITA architecture using XML Schemas. Most issues will be addressed in the XML Schema 1.1 specification. The main issue that remains unsolved from an architectural standpoint is the inability to rename/alias elements in a specific content model while making use of the inheritance model. Basically, being able to use the something like the substitutioGroup mechanism in a local context. With respect to inheritance, DITA cannot make full use of the XML Schema inheritance model. DITA is still fully represented in XML Schema without using the inheritance model. It means that developers who wish to create new DITA specializations have to manually validate its inheritance model which is prone to error. Out-of-the-box schema support for XML Schema in a publishing pipeline is another reason that in the documentation world use of schemas is very slow in its adoption. Hopefully, that will change when freely available applications that support XSLT 2.0 becomes more mainstream. Web browsers still do not support viewing/transforming schema validated XML document because they still uses XSLT 1.0 processors underneath the covers. User's must use CSS stylesheets to render their schema validated documents. Since the both DTDs and XML Schemas are normative for the DITA specification we are currently working on supporting both DTDs and XML Schemas validated documents in the DITA-OT (DITA Open Toolkit at SourceForge) publishing pipeline. It will work with XSLT 1.0 processors too. Kind regards, Eric
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