Appendix A. Comparison of markup formats

This compares four formats intended for publications markup:

uDoc 1.0

Mallard 1.1

DITA 1.2

DocBook 5



Feature

uDoc 1.0

Mallard 1.1

DITA 1.2

DocBook 5

Language

MicroXML

XML 1.0

Content Models

None. uDoc suggests what is appropriate, but you are free to do what you want.

XSD schemas, fairly permissive.

DTDs and schemas, very restrictive. Added restrictions that are unenforceable by machine validation are given in the spec.

DTDs, less restrictive than DITAs.

Maps

Maps describe the overall content and specify added resources for the project,

Guide topics are like maps, but have two-way linkage. If a topic links to a guide, a reference to it appears in the guide automatically.

Maps work much as in uDoc, but do not permit some content that uDoc allows.

The top-level document serves as the map, with subparts represented as entities.

Topics

Topics can have whatever is best for your own use case. You can create elements at will to capture whateversemantics you need.

Topics are categorized based on Information Mapping principles. The general “topic” type is discouraged in favor of specialized and restricted types like “concept”, “task”, and “reference”.

Not topic oriented.

Previous Topic:  6.5 Element Attributes

Sibling Topics:

The uDoc Document Format

Chapter 1. Why Use uDoc?

Chapter 2. uDoc Structures

Chapter 3. uDoc Processing

Chapter 4. uDoc Addressing

Chapter 5. uDoc File Generation

Chapter 6. uDoc Elements