Get Ready for DITA: Bypass Four Costly Roadblocks

Executive Summary

The emergence of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) as a general-purpose XML schema for technical documentation represents a significant step forward and opportunity for organizations that create extensive amounts of technical documentation and other related content. DITA offers organizations a ready means for structuring product-support content and the rapid adoption of DITA by XML technology vendors provides a number of options for implementing DITA productively.

Indeed, few vendors have hesitated to announce their “support” for DITA, even when that support is still not fully understood or defined. Moreover, there is a temptation for DITA to be positioned as a comprehensive and complete solution (just add water and stir!) In fact, the reality of implementing DITA is still evolving. At the same time, a community of knowledgeable users is beginning to emerge around DITA, complete with its first experienced practitioners.

While there are many compelling reasons to adopt DITA for developing and structuring product-support content, one of the most interesting aspects of DITA is specialization. Information developers can use specialization to customize the core DITA schema; this way, new information types can be introduced to a DITA application by extending the current application and maintaining core tools, processors and data structures...