From Eliot Kimber's XML 2007 Lightning Round Presentation: "DITA's specialization mechanism both enables sophisticated generic processing and effectively demands that tools provide it. That is, when presented with valid, conforming DITA documents, tools should "just work," applying all appropriate default DITA processing and behavior without any up-front configuration (with the possible exception of specifying the entity resolution catalog needed to resolve references to DTDs and schemas). Not many tools beyond the DITA Open Toolkit actually do just work. RSuite does. In particular, it uses the DITA 1.1 DITAArchVersion attribute to reliably detect DITA documents regardless of what local declaration set or specializations they use. As both an integrator and a provider of a tool designed to be integrated, those tools that also just work offer the greatest value to me as an integrator and service provider. I would like to see all DITA-aware tools provide the same level of automatic configuration and processing.

See also:

- Kimber's abstract