Well a month ago I decided as an exercise I would write my own DITA
transformations and have finally got off my ass and started. I am not
a fan of the openToolKit and Idiom's OpenTopic as a few of you know.
Basically I think they are poorly written, hard to maintain, and
update (there are others). I won't get into details but the likes of
Jim and a few others know my objection to both of these transformation
kits and certain aspects of DITA also.

I would like to use this forum to post my progress, ideas and get
feedback from the lot of you.

I've basically decided on a method to write the XSLT's that I hope
will fit into a solution and how certain elements need to be used.

Technologies to be used
XSLT 2.0
XPath 2.0
XSL 1.0
XLink and XPointer
Saxon 8
XEP
Ant (will be built as stand alone but am using Ant to test)
XDocs (as my XML CMS)

What I'm trying to accomplish will be easier with the above
technologies. I know that a couple of them are still only candidate
recommendations but it is basically a done deal.

Formats being output (this order basically)
XHTML
CHM
MSHelp 2003 (forgot the full name please correct if wrong)
MSHelp 2005 (forgot the full name please correct if wrong)
Eclipse Help
XSL PDF
Others ?

Each element will be built with clear and concise logic to output the
correct format vocabulary (ie: p -> p for XHTML output and any other
XHTML based format or p -> block for XSL). Since I'm only doing this
as an exercise and only spending upwards of 2 hrs per weekday on this
I do not expect to present anything for sometime.

Also input may be
a map - map/* as root or dita/map/*
map and content dita/map/* dita/concept/* dita/task/* basically all
docs in an amalgamated doc
content pages concept/* dita/concept/* etc

This I feel will be the more difficult of the tasks to do because it
relies on that all docs be accessible via a URI. So if your CMS does
not have valid uri/urls then this method will not work.

No fallback processing. Anybody who can read the OpenToolKit and
OpenTopic can create XSLT templates for specializations.

I'll post more later as my head is full of ideas and would like time
to write them down in a clear and concise manner.

Marijan (Mario) Madunic