We've talked about adding some sort of topic element to DocBook for almost a decade, off and on. (Back at least as far as the days when Novell was an active participant in the Davenport Group.)

The DITA folks make a lot of marketing hay out of their conceptual use of topics. I don't think there's a single, solitary technical advantage to DITA, but marketing doesn't depend on technical accuracy. It's also possible to argue that task-based authoring is not a good idea in general. It's ideal in some circumstances, but results in less useful and less usable documentation in other circumstances.

However, DocBook has never been principally about imposing a particular documentation style on authors. For the most part, we leave stylistic choices to authors.

With this in mind, I think we should consider, perhaps once and for all, whether we want to add a <topic> element to DocBook.

If we decide to do so, I think something along the following lines fits into the design of DocBook:

1. Add a <topic> element with the same content model as <section> except that where section allows (sect1|section|simplesect), we allow <topic>. So a topic contains subtopics analagous to the way a section contains subsections.

2. Give topic a class attribute so that authors can have different kinds of topics. DITA has all this funky weirdness about the content models of various kinds of topics; I don't think we should go there.

3. Allow topic as an alternative to (chapter|appendix|preface) in books. This allows one to have a book of topics.

4. Allow topic as an alternative to (sect1|section|simplesect) in chapters and appendixes. This allows one to have a chapter of topics.

As a slight extension of this model, we could also add a <tasktopic> element. This would address the feature request[1] for "task" as a peer to "section". If we did this, then I'd expect "topic" or "tasktopic" to be allowed anywhere I've mentioned topic above.

Given that topics are often composed in a fairly arbitrary order for publishing in print, we might want to consider adding a "contentmap" element as well for describing the order of topics. But we might be able to get "toc" to serve this purpose.

Be seeing you, norm