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.

Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning

The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

– Alvin Toffler, quoted by Jack Molisani in Be the Captain of Your Career

I’d seen this quotation before and liked it. But either the quotation stopped, or I stopped reading, after the word learn.

By unlearning things, I hope to avoid situations like this. (Source: The Far Side)

When I encountered the whole quotation I was brought up short. Sure, I recognize the need to learn — and keep on learning — in today’s world. (I even wrote about it recently.)

But do we need to unlearn and relearn too? What in the world does Toffler mean?

Then I thought of some things I’ve had to unlearn in my own life.

An appeal for DITA keys: Powerful, useful, and mostly ignored

Last week, in his webinar on conditional content, Noz Urbina showed a demo of content reuse using DITA’s conref attribute. I took the opportunity to ask for Noz’s opinion of keys and keyref.

Keys provide a powerful and useful function, Noz replied. But few people use them because the authoring tools don’t do a very good job of making them easy to use. And the tool manufacturers haven’t added the functionality because they don’t think anybody wants to use it.

It’s the classic chicken and egg scenario.

Noz is one of the smartest people in the content publishing space (and I highly recommend viewing that webinar, if a recording becomes available.) But is the story of keys really as simple as he makes it out to be?

The heart and mind of technical communication

I’ve seen the future. I turned my calendar to today’s date, and there it was.

And when I saw the future, do you know what I realized?

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of Technical Communication had better learn structured authoring.

I invite you to look into the future too. Just observe what’s going on today. Here’s what you’ll see:

• Content comes from all over the organization — and sometimes from customers and others as well. Gone are the days when all of the technical content came from the Tech Pubs department. With all of that collaboration going on, we need to have formats in which everyone can contribute content so that it’s easy to mash up together.
• People read content on all kinds of devices: tablets, smartphones, desktop PCs. If the content can’t at least be adapted to the screens where it’s displayed, it’s of no use. The industry leaders are going beyond adaptive content: they provide content that’s responsive (it changes format to fit the screen) and smart. Smart content changes based on the readers’ attributes: the product features they’ve purchased, their geographical location, and their preferences.
• Our employers demand content that affects the bottom line. One way to provide bottom-line value is through efficiency: content is developed once and then reused in many different contexts without the need for reformatting.

None of these scenarios would be possible without structured authoring. Structured authoring allows each piece of content to be tagged for a particular display format or for a particular user attribute, and it allows content to be reused.

Come down to the river: Structured authoring immersion

You can tell that Mollye Barrett has spent time in the South. During a recent talk on the content lifecycle, the Milwaukee-based content-management expert observed that when it comes to structured authoring, “you need to be immersed. It’s no good just to be sprinkled.”

Amen, sister!

Whether your platform of choice is DITA or something else, structured authoring is different from traditional authoring.

Adapting to the modern web

The New York Times website, recently redesigned to deliver more curated content, more dynamic content, and more paid content — all adding up to a “sleeker, faster, more intuitive” experience. (Source: nytimes.com)

Hypertext means more than just text with a bunch of links in it.

So begins Mark Baker’s timely and illuminating article on the nature of hypertext. If content on the web began as a set of articles linked to one another, it’s grown to encompass search results, social curation (for example, liking, tagging, and retweeting), and dynamically generated content.

As technical communicators, have we really grasped that? Reading through Mark’s article I’m struck by the dissonance between the way I develop content at work and the way I consume content after hours.