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By Fei Min Lorente
A group of local DITA enthusiasts met for the first time at
the Queen Street Commons Cafe, and found they had a lot to get excited about.
The message is that DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) can be for
everybody: from small shops to big companies, from the President to the
technical communicator. Not that we’re at the bottom of the hierarchy—I mean that DITA can be useful
for anyone from the least professional writer to the most, because chances are
that the information has to be shared, stored, retrieved, and maybe (gasp) even
re-used.
If you are wondering what in the world I’m talking about, start with this primer from Publishing Smarter: www.publishingsmarter.com/resources/books-and-articles/dita-primer-learn-dita Or come to our next meeting and we’ll talk you through it.
Once you know the basics, you’ll realize that DITA is really just another tagging language, like HTML, but you have to follow the rules. No missing end tags! Following rules is a good thing: it makes sure everyone can share files, and no DITA interpreter will misinterpret what you mean.
Speaking of meaning, DITA makes you think in semantics, not
format. You tag something as a title, not 14-point Calibri bold centred,
and not even Heading Level 3. Free yourself from the drudgery of formatting!
Admittedly, the hardest part is thinking in topics, but in this age of mobile devices and web apps, we have to think beyond the book paradigm. Remember grammar school, where each paragraph was supposed to begin with a topic sentence? That’s really all topic-based writing is. In DITA, a topic can be complex enough to need several paragraphs, lists, and graphics, but it should be just what you need to describe the topic, and no more. If you can do this, the information you create is more useful because it’s reusable. You can still get a book in the end, but you can also have training material, specifications, test plans, marketing material, annual reports, and more.
Several DITA evangelists want to spread the word that DITA is not just for technical communicators: it can forge the path to enterprise-wide content management. Why waste time writing the same information in different ways? Why write it again just because you don’t know that someone else has already written it? With another powerful feature of DITA—metadata (information about the information)—you can create intelligent content that is easy to find when you need it, notifies stakeholders of changes, gets approved by the right people, and automatically disseminates updates to the right places.
Even the experts have more to discover, so they are looking forward to the next meeting. In the meantime, they’d like to leave you with a few links to explore:
- For more information about implementing DITA using Microsoft Office and SharePoint, see DITA Exchange (www.ditaexchange.com/Pages/Home.aspx)
- For people who can help you customize your DITA list of tags so you only see the ones that are relevant to your workplace, see Ditanauts (ditanauts.org)
- For a discussion group on LinkedIn, see the DITA Awareness Group
- If you want to join the local DITA Special Interest Group or attend future meetings, please contact Javed at dita@stc-soc.org
