Alan HouserPrincipal Consultant and Trainer

Tel: 412-363-3481arh@groupwellesley.comwww.groupwellesley.com

What They Won't Tell You About DITA

Group Wellesley, Inc.

About Me

• Consultant and Trainer in Publishing Tools and Technologies

• Member OASIS DITA Technical Committee

• Society for Technical Communication, Liaison to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• Fellow, Society for Technical Communication

• Conference Manager, Society for Technical Communication Summit,Sacramento, CA, May 15-18 2011

• Candidate for Vice President, Society for Technical Communication, 2011-2012

Overview

• Key differences between open-source and common off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions in cost, maintainability, and typical feature set

• Key differences between standards-based and proprietary solutions

• Surprising and under-publicized pain points when working with DITA

• Issues to be aware of when considering DITA or other XML-based publishing solutions

• Indicators for and against DITA or other XML-based publishing solutions

But Open-Source is Free!

• Purchase may be free, but…

• When configuration, customization, and support costs are considered, total cost of deployment tends to be similar to COTS solutions.

Standards-Based vs. Proprietary Solutions

Standards-Based

• Slow

• Compromised

• Consensus-driven

Proprietary

• Fast

• Optimized

• Market-driven

What about DITA?

• You may be solving problems that you didn’t know were problems.

• Some things that were once easy will become hard. Some will become very hard.

• If your organization shares publishing requirements with IBM, you’re probably in luck. If not, good luck.

Important DITA Features?

• The DITA Prime Directive: Universal source file interoperability. Specialization/generalization model.

• Explicit support for variables? Not yet. Maybe DITA 1.3.

• Output formats from the DITA Open Toolkit:Eclipse Help? Check. Context-sensitive HTML Help or WebHelp? No.

DITA: Ease of Deployment and Maintenance

“Armies”Well-known technical communication conference presenter and

thought leader, when asked about the resources his company devotes to publishing his DITA content.

DITA: The Hard Stuff

• Graphics with annotations

• Equations

• Customizing output (especially PDF, which is Really Hard)

• Specialization (harder than you might be led to believe)

• Topic management, especially without a CMS

• Legacy content migration

PDF Publishing:The Achilles Heel of DITA?

“We have invested megabucks in a CMS and collaborative writing and DITA, we're on the cutting edge and making it happen - and our PDFs look like sh*t!”

Employee of DITA adopting organization

The Problem with DITA and PDF

Publishing to PDF is generally through a two-step process:

• XSLT (transformation) > XSL-FO (formatting)

XSL-FO: “A very powerful language for creating ugly pages.”

• XSL-FO is highly complex, unforgiving

• Any formatting changes will require programming skills

• Processing and presentation are inextricably combined

• No opportunity for manual formattingintervention

DITA Tools:Features and Capabilities

“Gee, this tool has a lot more features than <our former XML authoring tool>.”

Student learning popular help authoring toolafter working in an XML environment

• Tools tend to provide basic features for authoring

• Project management features tend to be punted to the CMS

Migrating to DITA

“Migration will cost a fortune. If your information is consistent and implicitly structured, it will cost a small fortune.”

Well-known publishing consultant

• Migrating legacy content to DITA is a difficult, resource-intensive (e.g., time and/or $$$) problem. There are no easy solutions.

But XML is the Future, Correct?

• Not on the Web

• W3C has ceased XHTML activities

• Efforts of splinter group (WHATWG) has become HTML5. “Pave the cowpaths” trumps “pedantic correctness.”

• Draconian error handling, complexity, remain major issues for XML

Where Does DITA Work?

• Reuse. Real Reuse. Topics appearing in multiple contexts. Not “copyright statement” reuse.

• Translation, where benefits of automated publishing outweigh development costs and lack of control. Usually this means many languages.

• Small organizations, that need a low-barrier entry to single-source, multi-channel publishing, who can easily adapt to DITA limitations and don’t have large bodies of legacy content.

DITA: More that they won’t tell you

• Many COTS tools support content reuse (topic, chunk, and phrase-level), automated and semi-automated publishing, multi-channel publishing, content filtering.

• COTS-based workflows can be optimized for translation efficiency. There’s little “magic” about XML for translation, except automated publishing.

• Desktop publishing, like all technologies, can present inefficiencies. But these are often exaggerated.

What’s Next for DITA?

• Will vendors support DITA 1.2?

• Will adopters use DITA 1.2?

• Do we need a WHATWG-style alternative to DITA?

Contact Us!

We hope you enjoyed this presentation. Please feel free to contact us:

Alan Houserarh@groupwellesley.com

Group Wellesley, Inc.933 Wellesley RoadPittsburgh, PA 15206USA412-363-3481www.groupwellesley.com