NLDITA Executive Tea – or: what is the added value of DITA

by Wim Hooghwinkel, initiator of NLDITA.

NLDITA 2010 Executive Tea theme was: making money with DITA. How to save on production costs for documentation using DITA. Various speakers have cited this: working with topics and re-use of content can lead to faster production, reduced translation costs and more diversity in output, customizable publishing, processing more information with fewer people, and much more. In short: what is keeping us… .

Many organizations are not ready (yet) to switch to a modular way of working with XML in a rapidly changing environment . There are parallels with software development, object-oriented programming or with the agile method that replaces traditional ‘waterfall’ workflow methods. With Agile software development cooperation is of essential importance, in addition to flexibility and production of components, just as it is with DITA. And just as it is with DITA not all organizations can easyly adopt agile methods or managers are hesitating to let go of existing known and fixed patterns.

History

In his article ‘The History of DITA’ Bob Doyle sketches an historical context, where minimalism and Information Mapping can be considered as precursors of DITA and where the development of (S)GML, HTML and XML are placed in the context of the development of structures and techniques for documentation and information processing. However, some people challenge this historical link between minimalism and DITA, because DITA tends to be more like an information typology while minimalism is based on design rules for writing. But then again, all these different concepts seem to confluence into DITA, including minimalism in a usable setting. Design rules as far as it concernes task based and user centric writing got their manifestation in the DITA topic types. The XML structure enforces a user centric way of writing, what is especially true for the Task topic. Even the Information mapping vendors claim that DITA is not something new but is based on the same concepts that were used to develop IMAP years before.

Simple or complex?

Technology has a downside. Developers fall back on tools and processes and tend to use DITA as yet another XML technique to do smart conversions and run scripts to create the most wonderfull products. Of course this brings us very important and beautifull solutions, see the presentations at NLDITA, but  from the viewpoint of writers and end users DITA seems to become very complex. And that is not what we want.

Business managers then want to have quick results. With DITA however you can not expect benefits without changing the way we work, without making changes in the organisation it self.

Dorothy Hoskins wrote in her white paper ‘Dita is Open for Business’: Like the HTML standard in the 1990s, the DITA standard is poised today to make changes in the ways companies develop and interchange information. And like with HTML the growing acceptance of DITA and the growing support by tools will be the most important reason why DITA will become the ‘defacto’ standard for information development. HTML became popular only when WYSIWYG editors came available and after it was possible to make an HTML page in Word. The real DITA break through will be forced by editors that are WYSIWYM¹ out of the box and make it possible to edit DITA-XML without knowledge of DTD's and schemas.

Promise

Only then DITA can fullfill it’s inherent promise that all participants of the NLDITA2010 Executive Tea agreed on: providing platform, system and device independent exchange of knowledge and information.

The time of Information on Demand is dawning.

Or is it as one of the speakers mentioned on a side dish: Making money with DITA? That’s only true for us, consultants and system developers … .

We will see at NLDITA2011, next year June in Utrecht!

¹ WYSIWYM = What You See Is What You Mean: assigning semantic ‘formatting’ to the content where presentation is dependent of the information carrier (also WYSIOO: What You See Is One Option).