DITA Is Open For Business

Back in early 2002, I spoke at a conference held by the IEEE in Portland, Oregon on information management technologies. While I now don't remember what the exact talk I gave was about (I vaguely remember it being related to the fairly recently released XSLT 1.0 specification), I did remember another talk at that conference, one on a brand new set of technical XML standards called the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, or DITA. At the time I was intrigued (and felt that it had some real potential to go somewhere) but as it was still primarily an inhouse architecture for IBM and the tools available for it were very primitive at the time, I logged it in as being an "technology to watch" and moved on.

In the decade or so since then, DITA has gone from being an interesting curiosity to becoming a mainstay in technical publishing. It's topic-based approach differed dramatically both from the HTML-centric mode used on the web and the book-oriented DocBook format in that it worked upon the assumption that a documentation/help system could be created by defining a number of specialized topic or article modules, then creating a map document that served to provide the interconnections between the articles. By taking this approach, it meant that documentation development could be broken up and distributed among multiple developers without compromising the integrity of the final product, and it also meant that extensions to these models, called specializations in DITA, could provide enhanced support for different industry verticals.

Dorothy Hoskins, a principle at Novatek Communications, is an XSLT developer and strong DITA advocate, and recently wrote a very informative white paper on DITA - what it is, who the vendors and project developers are, who's using it and how. In her paper DITA is Open for Business, Dorothy covers both the basics and provides a good set of link resources for exploring the concepts involved in greater depth. Certainly it helped illuminate a set of standards that ultimately look to be the gold standard for documentation development.

DITA is open for Business
Novatek Communications