The first chapter meeting of the season featured a healthy turnout of new and familiar faces and a fine presentation on a cutting-edge topic. DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML authoring standard that enables unprecedented flexibility and specialization for producing multiple documents from a single source.
Although IBM provided much of the initial investment in developing and promoting DITA, other XML tool vendors, such as Blast Radius (well known locally for their XMetaL authoring tool) have now begun spreading the DITA gospel. Presenting at the meeting were Blast Radius’s own Paul Prescod and Su-Laine Yeo.
Paul had the floor for the first part of the presentation, which began with a short history lesson and crash course on XML, before moving on to discuss the main features of DITA, including the basic building blocks of DITA documents (topics and maps), and the DITA tool kit, which determines how deliverables are created from DITA documents.
As is usually the case with these types of product presentations, it’s not until you see the tool in action that you can appreciate its power and ease of use. Su-Laine took over from Paul for the second part of the meeting to discuss DITA topics and maps in greater detail and finally to demonstrate Blast Radius’s XMetaL Author DITA Edition. The concepts Su-Laine discussed in the context of DITA were familiar ones: using conditional text, writing in topic-sized chunks for later reuse, and ordering those chunks using DITA map files, which are similar to FrameMaker book files. Even a writer who has no experience with XML can grasp how DITA takes an unfamiliar standard and presents it in a user-friendly format.
If you work with a Content Management System — several CMS vendors are already getting on board and supporting DITA — and in a collaborative environment with either a team of writers or with colleagues across several departments, DITA authoring tools may be your ultimate single-sourcing solution.
Judging by the steady stream of questions from the audience, there is a lot of interest in DITA right now. It’s a safe bet that this interest will lead to DITA being invited into many techcomm departments in the near future.
