Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2006/January 2007

October 2006 Meeting -- Content Reuse in DITA
Presented by Yas Etessam and reviewed by Gina Gotsill

At the October 2006 meeting, DITA expert and XMetaL consultant Yas Etessam discussed Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and other details of structured authoring. Developed by IBM and made into an OASIS standard in May 2005, DITA is a standardized framework used to manage XML documents and document types. DITA applies Darwinian principles that allow for the natural evolution of these document types through inheritance and specialization, information typing, and architecture.

Although XML technology has been around for years, authoring in XML has not been widely adopted outside the technical publications community. Organizations find many obstacles to adopting XML. These obstacles include:

• Cost of developing custom document types
• Scarce tool support for out-of-the-box XML authoring, reviewing, and publishing
• Old standards that promote monolithic documents and don't encourage collaborative authoring or reuse Lack of compatibility between different document types

DITA solves many adoption issues by providing a standard document type that can be easily extended for any company or vertical market. Its architectural features promote information typing and collaboration. Many applications from content management systems to authoring tools provide out-of-the-box support for DITA.

Key DITA concepts include:

• Topic orientation
• Maps that resemble a Table of Contents
• Content reference (conref) that provides links to XML chunks
• Specialization of structure and domain
• Conditional text that allows authors to add a flag or filter

DITA offers organizations:

• Interchangeable content, which enables sharing
• Many familiar elements common to HTML code
• Simple structure, with features that promote re-use and filtering of content

DITA makes re-use of content quick and easy. Not only does re-use of content save time and cut translation costs, it also improves consistency and reduces errors.

"When you update redundant content, every version that you have to re-write slows you down," Etessam says. "DITA's conref feature is perfect for centrally managing and updating small amounts of content that appear in many places."

DITA's ability to map topics streamlines authoring. DITA allows information developers to embed maps within maps, and enter related links into the content from outside sources. DITA's maps and topic feature allows information developers to apply attributes that filter information according to audience, operating system, and product conditions.

The authoring tool, XMetaL Author, automatically recognizes DITA documents and ensures that valid DITA XML is always being created. DITA comes with three topic types: concept, task, and reference. "If the standard DITA topics do not accurately describe an organization's content, there are ways to tailor them to work just for you," Etessam says.

For example, the Reference topic might be too general for an organization that requires a Parts List topic. For this situation, DITA provides a mechanism to define more specialized topics. The authoring tool can easily recognize the specialized content.

The major benefits of DITA technology are:

• Lower implementation costs
• Faster response time
• Consistent, quality deliverables

To find out more about DITA, Etessam recommended the following sites:
dita.xml.org
www.xmetal.com

Find the DITA toolkit at sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot

Or, Google "dita xml."

Gina Gotsill is a proposal writer for TechProse, a Lafayette, California-based technical communications consulting firm.

| Newsletter Front Page | Newsletter Home | SF Chapter Contacts | SF Chapter Home Page | STC Home Page |