It’s a fair bet that the introduction of the new Troubleshooting information type into the DITA 1.3 technical authoring standard will affect how all Technical Authors write troubleshooting topics, regardless of whether they use DITA or not. That’s because the proposed elements for troubleshooting topics make good sense, and it offers a standardised approach to writing… Read more »
Category: DITA
Different world views of content and content strategy
There’s a wonderful German word, die Weltanschauung, which roughly translates as a view of the world. It suggests there is a framework of ideas and beliefs behind people’s descriptions of various things in the world. I was reminded of Weltanschauung at this week’s London Agile Content Meetup, where Rahel Bailie neatly summed up some of the different views of… Read more »
Which problems were the creators of DITA trying to solve?
We’re currently working on updating our DITA Basics training course. It’s likely we’ll offer the course as an self-study online course, a classroom course, and as a live tutor-led course delivered over the Internet. In carrying out this exercise, we realised that there was a need to answer some basic, fundamental, questions. So let’s look at some… Read more »
The number of companies using DITA – a story of success or failure?
It’s been seven years since DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) became an open standard. DITA, for those that don’t know, is an XML-based standard for structuring, writing, managing and publishing the type of content that you’d typically find in user guides, online Help and other technical documentation. Recently, the DITAWriter web site researched how many organisations… Read more »
How much content can you actually re-use when you move to single sourcing?
One of the challenges when considering moving to a single sourcing authoring environment, such as DITA, is determining the Return on Investment. This often boils down to a key question: how much content can you actually re-use? Organisations typically attempt to answer this question in a number of ways: Conducting a semi-manual information audit of the… Read more »