Lightweight DITA: I’ve seen the light

Lightweight DITA doesn’t have a logo yet. The technical committee is welcome to use this one.

If you’ve taken one of my DITA classes, you’ve heard me extol the power of DITA. One aspect of that power is semantic tagging. In DITA, a piece of content isn’t boldface or italics. It’s a command name. Or it’s a citation to another document. Or it’s the name of a screen (a wintitle, in DITA parlance).

That’s a big selling point for DITA, you probably heard me say. Each DITA element represents what a thing is (hence the term semantic) rather than how it looks. Just think: you can take a big document and generate a list of all the command names, or all the screen names. You can’t do that when you’re just tagging things as boldface and italics.

Turns out there are a couple of problems.

• First, I’ve never met anyone who wanted to generate a list of all the command names, or all the screen names. While it sounds good in theory, in practice it’s more like a solution in search of a problem.
• Second, it’s a lot to remember. When is a command parameter a parameter? When is it an option? (DITA has tags for both.) Writers working side by side, writing content for the same help system, might tag the same object in different ways.

Just now, in fact, as I wrote this article, I couldn’t remember the name of the tag for citations. Even though I’m accustomed to using it, I couldn’t retrieve <cite> from my brain. I had to look it up.

Enter Lightweight DITA.

The best gifts I’ve received

I like gifts. Just don’t say “free gift.” That sets my teeth on edge.

In this gift-giving season, I pause to recognize some of the people who’ve given me gifts during my career. There are lot of them, but these stand out.

The manager who invited me to bring any and every problem to him — as long as I also brought a solution. My solution might not, in the end, be the solution we chose. But it started our conversation, and — most important — it got me focused on fixing, not dwelling on, my problems.

The public-speaking trainer who, early in my career, assured me that my audience wants me to succeed — not make mistakes they can pick apart. To prove his point, he asked me what I want from a speaker when I’m a member of the audience.

A colleague’s advice that speaking or teaching is a form of gift-giving — that my words are something of value, a gift for my audience. People like to receive gifts, he said, and you should enjoy giving them too.

Just one word: DITA

The team-lead, at IBM in the early 1980s, who encouraged me to learn a precursor of DITA that was just coming into use. Think of Benjamin Braddock and “plastics” — except that I took it to heart. I embraced the idea of structured authoring before I could become too set in my ways as a technical writer. I’ve benefited ever since.

Finally, numerous managers who saw farther than I could and helped me prepare for what was coming — whether it was a new technology or a department-wide layoff. And other managers who took a chance on me, and then — when I didn’t get it right the first time — took a second chance.

I’m grateful to all of them.

I’d like to hear about gifts you’ve received that helped you in your career. Share your stories in the comments.

Survey says: DITA’s benefits and challenges

What are DITA‘s biggest benefits? Its greatest challenges?

The Content Wrangler is surveying DITA users, and last week Scott Abel — joined by DITA cognoscenti Rob Hanna,Mark Lewis, and Keith Schengili-Roberts — presented some preliminary results.

I’ve listed the rankings here, along with some thoughts of my own. Each numbered item is from Scott’s presentation; the commentary between the numbered items is mine.

(The survey is still accepting responses. If you haven’t yet weighed in, you can do so right now.)

What benefits does DITA provide?

This section was open to all respondents.

1, Consistency: content reuse/single-sourcing
Yes: when I think of single-sourcing, I think of consistency. But I also think about flexibility — of being able to publish the same content on the web, as integrated help, as PDF, and in other formats. For me that’s a big benefit, just as much as — and probably more than — consistency.

2. Usability: structure provides predictability

3. Translation: savings from reusing translation
The panelists remarked that they expected this one to score higher, and theorized that many of the survey respondents were content creators but were not the people actually responsible for translation. I think they’re probably right — and I’d also point out that a lot of organizations simply don’t translate their content. It would be interesting if the survey asked how many are currently translating DITA content.

4. Customization: segmentation, personalization
Nice to see this one crack the top 4. I think we (the community of DITA content producers) are just beginning to take advantage of features like metadata and keys. There’s so much more we can do to adapt content based on the audience’s geographic location, experience level, and so forth. (Key scopes and branch filtering in DITA 1.3 hold out even more promise.)

Rank the biggest challenges associated with using DITA

This section was open to respondents who said they use DITA.

1. Reuse: determining reuse strategy
Conref or keyref? What taxonomy to use, and where to put the metadata (in topics or in maps)? Who “owns” the library of reusable content? There doesn’t seem to be much consensus on best practices when it comes to developing a reuse strategy. Maybe, like the consultants always say, it depends — on what the writing team is
used to, on which groups are collaborating to produce content, and on what the corporate culture will support.

2. Usage: making DITA do what we want it to do

3. Training: equipping staff with skills needed
There’s a ton of training out there — in the basics of structured authoring, in DITA itself, and in the various tools. So I’m not sure what the problem is, unless it’s that companies don’t want to pay for training and want simply to hire people who already know everything (see #7 below). Even if you could hire fully-capable DITA writers off the street (and that’s a big if), they still need to be trained in how to use your local style, transforms, and so forth.

4. Technology: understanding software

5. Formatting: developing stylesheets and rules for content
This isn’t rocket science, but it is serious, hard work. It’s often not considered when companies plan a transition to DITA — which makes it even harder.

6. Governance: enforcing the rules
See number 5 above.

7. Staffing: finding experienced talent

8. Creation: understanding how to create DITA content

9. Measurement: what to measure, how to decide
Let’s be honest: rather than what to measure, don’t we really mean making the business case? We still struggle to quantify the cost savings and revenue enhancement associated with structured authoring and DITA. Translation savings, of course, are a big part of the story. But increased usability, customization, and brand consistency have value too. We just have a hard time quantifying their value.

10. Translation: issues associated with DITA content

So there you have it. What do you think? Do any of the rankings surprise you? Is anything missing from either list?

Do you agree with my take?

Thanks to Scott Abel for conducting the survey. Like so much of what he does, it’s of great value to the technical writing community. Thanks to Rob, Mark, and Keith for their contributions as well.

DITA satisfaction: Take the survey

Want to know why people are using DITA? Want more insight into the challenges as well as the benefits?

Here’s a way to get those insights — and do The Content Wrangler a favor in the process. The Content Wrangler, the online persona of Scott Abel, has been for many years a leading voice in the worlds of content marketing and technical communication.

If you’re using DITA, if you’re evaluating it, or if you’re in the process of adopting it, take the 5-minute DITA Satisfaction Survey.

The results, which will be sent to you when the survey is over, will provide helpful data about what people see as the main reasons for using DITA as well as its risks and challenges.

The data will benefit individual DITA users and the DITA community as a whole. It’ll equip us to respond to common problems and complaints, and it’ll inform the DITA Technical Committee about what changes and enhancements are most needed.

Take the survey by May 15 and you’ll be entered into a drawing for Google Cardboard.

DITA adoption: What are the numbers?

I just saw this infographic from IXIASOFT about a subject near and dear to my heart: the adoption of DITA.

Like so many infographics, unfortunately, this one is a mess. It’s cluttered, with so many elements competing for my attention that I can’t tell what its key messages are.

I don’t expect IXIASOFT to know how to create good infographics. That’s not their business. But I expect them to know about DITA and about the technical writing community in general.

That’s why I’m taken aback by some of their numbers:

• There are 150,000 technical writers on LinkedIn? Even if that’s a worldwide total, it  seems high. What occupations does IXIASOFT lump under the heading “technical writer”?
• Only 9,000 say they know DITA? That seems about right – as an absolute number, but not as a percentage of the total. Of the people who are true technical writers, surely more than 6 percent know DITA.
• 4.0 percent of job ads ask for DITA experience? That’s surprisingly low, considering that by IXIASOFT’s own count more than 600 companies have adopted DITA and a growing number of writers claim to know it. I recall seeing another presentation that put this number in the 10-to-20 percent range, but I can’t place my hands on it. Does anybody have data on this?

I looked on IXIASOFT’s website for illumination. There I found a piece in which Keith Schengili-Roberts put the 6 percent figure into context by noting that only 15 percent of technical writers claim to know FrameMaker. That makes me wonder all the more how broad their “technical writer” umbrella is.

I also discovered that this infographic has been around since at least November 2014. In the earlier version (which you’ll find in Keith’s article) the numbers are slightly different. But they still look suspect.

I’d like to find a truer picture of DITA adoption. Does anybody know of one?

DITA lets the authors drive

This morning, April 1, brings welcome news from the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. Recognizing at long last that DITA authors want and deserve the opportunity to screw up the formatting in their documents, the committee has provided new ways to do just that.

“Microsoft Word, the most popular text editing software in the world, lets authors make a royal mess out of their formatting,” explained Technical Committee spokesman Mark Upton. “The users of DITA deserve no less.”

Through XSL transforms, the DITA Open Toolkit has always provided ways to make hash out of document formats. But typically those features fall within the purview of the information architect. Most rank-and-file authors can’t, or won’t, master the necessary XSLT coding skills.

With today’s newly announced features, authors can now create formatting nightmares directly within their DITA topics.

Here’s how it works.