Michael Priestly: DITA Guru

By Kathryn Bender

Michael Priestly

On April 26th, Michael Priestly led a session for the STC Southwestern Ontario Chapter’s Education Days titled Introduction to DITA. He has been working with DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) since its inception, so his afternoon session was educational for all who attended.

As the Technology Strategist for IBM's Total Information Experience (TIE), Michael works with groups across IBM to define features and requirements for projects such as IBM's Knowledge Center and DITA Wiki. He is IBM's lead DITA architect, and developed the first specialization and map architectures for DITA. He was the co-editor of the OASIS DITA 1.0 and 1.1 specifications. He is an experienced information architect and XML architect, and has presented and published prolifically on information development processes, information design principles, XML development techniques, structured authoring, Web 2.0, and DITA. His extensive DITA background made him a great candidate to teach us why we should use DITA and a few of the main features that every DITA user should become familiar with.

Michael is an advocate for this simple authoring program and how it can be utilized for reuse purposes and can save on translation costs. DITA allows technical writers everywhere to standardize their authoring efforts so content can be used by many people, for many products, and across many audiences. DITA encourages chunking content into topics (commonly concepts, tasks, and reference material), so it is more readable by users. Everything about DITA facilitates easy learning on the part of the user, and the cost and time savings make it an attractive tool for corporations to use.

Michael also discussed new DITA 1.2 capabilities including why technical writers should start using keyrefs. It turns out that keyrefs are a great linking mechanism. They can be used for keywords (to link you directly to other related topics), or it can be used to link to resources outside of a deliverable (like external websites). It is an easy and reliable way to provide resources without having to worry about the links not working if the topic is used in more than one deliverable. What a great idea!

To learn more about the wonderful world of DITA and Michael’s thoughts on the subject, please visit his blog at http://dita.xml.org/blog/25.