Reply To: Pls help! Document created using customized DTD not showing properly in XMETAL

[Derek Read]

[This issue has been taken over by XMetaL Support and Professional Services. The following is primarily for the benefit of other readers of this thread]

A custom DTD that defines similar elements to DITA was being used here and not a specialized DITA DTD (as outlined in the DITA Architectural Specification). This is why DITA authoring functionality was not fully enabled (or in other words, mostly broken). Any functionality that was working was essentially working by accident (or coincidence) due to the similarity in element names and the partial integration of portions of the DITA customization into the set of customization files configured for this DTD.

Using “custom” DTDs (vs properly specialized DITA DTDs) is unsupported, and it doesn't really make sense to do this anyway (at least in my opinion) because specialization is clearly outlined, and many DITA-aware tools support it, including the DITA Open Toolkit. Even if all the work needed to customize XMetaL to provide a nice authoring experience for this DTD was done (one similar to what we already provide for DITA and specialized DTD), additional customization work would also likely need to be done to make this work with any other tools, possibly including the DITA OT. That seems to be a waste of effort to me. It would also lock your content more tightly to one vendor (us). Although I'm sure most people reading this use XMetaL, leaving your choices for both DITA authoring and processing tools open is always a good thing to do.

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