We create, assemble and distribute content to a large audience of users— this information might be technical methods, service materials, user guides, proposals, policies, books, CDs or Web pages.
We have systems in place for authoring, producing and delivering our critical information. But there’s room for improvement in our content life-cycle—we can cut costs, clean up processes, produce quality deliverables, and reduce the resource load on IT.
And not surprisingly, many other challenges can exist for companies producing lots of content, but there’s hope. By updating outdated processes and tools, content teams can run
more efficiently, quality will improve, audiences will be happier, and tangible returns on content management investments will be achieved. How can that be? The answer is a DITA XML architecture.
more efficiently, quality will improve, audiences will be happier, and tangible returns on content management investments will be achieved. How can that be? The answer is a DITA XML architecture.
XML is a popular technology for creating and storing content. It’s structured, scalable, reusable, supports translation to different languages, and enables production of clean data output into multiple formats. By standardizing on XML we plan to realize many benefits-for example, errors associated with expensive copy-paste-format processes will be eliminated, and replaced with functionality that enables "write once, use in many places".
DITA is one of the most important innovations in XML publishing in years. Its benefits include:
- Easier application development and maintenance
- Faster author training
- Better information reuse and sharing
What is DITA anyway?
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture (open source) for authoring, producing, and delivering information as discrete, typed topics. Typical information delivered is technical in nature and published as online help, through product support portals, or as print-ready PDF files.
DITA originated and is extensively used in the IBM Corporation. It’s also used in many organizations world-wide, and is supported by an ever-growing list of commercial and open-source tools. DITA is actively being extended and enhanced under the direction of the OASIS DITA.
The DITA architecture, along with appropriate tools, is used to create, manage, and publish XML-based, structured information in a wide variety of environments and platforms. It facilitates information sharing and reuse, and collaborative writing projects. It reduces writing, publishing, and translation costs. And it integrates tightly with many related technologies.
What can DITA do for you?
Web and document publishing is complex and costly. DITA can help ease the pain. Throughout the information lifecycle DITA offers benefits—for the writers, reviewers, content managers, information consumers, IT teams, and the business as a whole by reducing work effort and saving money.
Who uses DITA and how?
Anyone that creates, manages and publishes topic based technical content can use DITA to simplify and greatly improve their authoring/publishing environment. DITA is a big winner when it comes to modular reusable content, especially if you manage large volumes of information. DITA is on the horizon and is used in just about every industry, like financial services, insurance, aerospace, government, education, healthcare, high technology, professional services and others, and in many different lines of business too.
Why use DITA?
DITA offers many powerful features that align to our specific business needs- like modularity, structured writing, information typing, minimalism, inheritance, specialization, simplified XML, single-source, topic-based, ready-made metadata, conditional processing, component publishing, task-orientation, content reuse, multi-channel, and translation-friendly. The DITA Open Toolkit allows you to publish to popular output formats (HTML, HTML Help, PDF, Java Help, XHTML, RTF etc.) from DITA based content. DITA is increasing in popularity—more tools are hitting the market to author and publish DITA.
How does DITA work?
The DITA architecture is made up of topics and maps
- Topics are content chunks that you can reuse in different deliverable's
- Maps define the structure of how topics are to be viewed in different deliverable's
- Topics and maps are XML files that you can edit with any DITA XML editor
- Images and video files are inserted via a reference
- DITA can be output to different formats, including HTML, online help and print
What is the DITA Open Toolkit?
DITA Open Toolkit is a Java-based implementation of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee's specification for DITA DTDs and schemas. The Toolkit, which can be used in the Windows, Linux/UNIX, and Mac OS operating environments, transforms DITA content (maps and topics) into deliverable formats. The Toolkit uses Apache Ant for processing.
DITA Open Toolkit publishes to the following environments:
- XHTML and HTML Help
- PDF and PDF2
- Eclipse Content and Eclipse help
- DocBook and JavaHelp
- Word RTF and troff
What is a DITA editor?
Creating and managing DITA content involves writing and editing with a "DITA-aware" authoring tool, and storing (in most organizations) and managing content using a CMS. Some authoring tools and CMSs contain the embedded DITA Open Toolkit (or equivalent functionality) to allow processing within the tool, or CMS.
DITA-aware authoring tools help to ensure XML is well-formed and valid. That is, the tool prevents you from saving a file with errors.
Why use a CMS with DITA?
DITA projects that involve a large numbers of topics, many authors, or geographically distributed authoring and production teams, may benefit from the features provided by a CMS.
A CMS is used to store files for a DITA project. A DITA aware CMS will show the structured view of the files, the content contained in the files, and the relationships among the files.
A CMS that is DITA aware can also report on Meta information about the files, and syntactic and semantic information about the content.
It’s really helpful when the DITA aware CMS has processing capabilities—that means, integrating the DITA Open Toolkit processing, and debugging/reporting aids that operate along with file processing.
CMSs should also provide basic source control functionality for all the DITA files.
- DITA Open Toolkit Project (2011). Retrieved May 10, 2011, from http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/
- Anna van Raaphorst and Richard H. (Dick) Johnson (Fourth edition, December 17, 2007). DITA Open Toolkit User Guide. SourceForge.net. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/
- Tony Self (May 20, 2011). DITA for Help. WritersUA. Retrieved May 20, 2011, from http://www.writersua.com
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