I am in the DITA webinar now, enjoying Bill Rabkin’s demo of Idiom World Server. If you would like my slides (PDF form) please click here..
Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 40 of 58)
Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.
So I will be participating in Wednesday’s webinar with Idiom and Blast Radius, “DITA Directions: Topic-Oriented Single Source Publishing for the Web and Beyond.” Most of my presentation will be based on our upcoming white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies, which is subtitled, “Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).” The white paper focuses on two highly successful case studies of DITA in use at Adobe and Autodesk. Both of these companies have already produced tens of thousands of pages of documentation and Help using DITA. In both cases, the documentation is being simultaneously, or near simultaneously, released in more than 15 languages. The case studies are impressive and offer a lot of insight for other companies who are considering going down this path.
We continue to be struck by the rapid adoption of DITA across the product support marketplace, and are starting to see uses of DITA outside this specific application. We are hard pressed to come up with other document-management or content-management standards or technologies that have enjoyed such rapid adoption and widespread use. So one of my slides, sampled below, has a litle fun with Gartner’s now classic Hype Cycle chart. Has DITA avoided the Hype Cycle, where the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is followed necessarily by a steep drop to a “Trough of Disillusionment”? Here we are in the midst of the hype over DITA (indeed, the standard was only formally published in May 2005), and the case studies show productive work being done in advance of the approved standard. Impressive, don’t you think?
Bob Doyle at CMSReview has once again generously devoted his time and resources to record and produce one of the events at our recent Boston conference. David Berlind from ZDNet, who has tracked the controversial Massachusetts decision to standardize on OASIS‘s ODF on Between the Lines (a blog you should subscribe to) in more detail than anyone, interviewed lobbyist Morgan Reed from the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) before a live audience at Gilbane Boston. ACT, who lobbies for small businesses, but also Microsoft, is against the Massachusetts decision – Morgan was gracious enough to submit to David’s penetrating skepticism. Bob Doyle says he keeps this interview on his video iPod! Bob says you should use the QuickTime player. Here is the full interview, or you can choose chapters below:
Frank Gilbane – the Background
The Debaters – Morgan Reed and David Berlind
Lobbyist for Microsoft (MS) and Small ISVs
How Much Money Spent Lobbying Open Formats?
MS to Mass: Do you respect IP?
MS Press Release: Mass ODF Plan has failed!
By 2007 only ODF-compliant applications?
Does Massachusetts have any leverage with OASIS?
What if MS OpenOffice was chosen as standard?
Do MS and Internet Explorer encourage non-standard HTML?
Vince Wicker & Mike Wayne of The XBRL Show recorded our session on XBRL – Current State of the Art at the Gilbane Boston conference, and created a very useful 20-minute-or-so podcast. Thanks Vince & Mike!
I had flashbacks as I sat in the DITA session at the Boston Gilbane Conference. True flashbacks. Back to the days of creating a complex automated compilation “system” to create context-sensitive help for a Windows-based manufacturing control application. Partnered with an object-oriented developer who had better things to do than “play nice” with a technical writer, we managed to build a routine based on Word macros, RTF, Excel, and DLLs to output coded Microsoft help files linked directly to RC files. Convoluted, but it made us proud.
The flashback was not about the coding, although I felt compelled to document the story. It was more about the writing methdology developed with my fellow technical writers. All about standard topics, we developed a core set of help panels based on chunking information into concepts, procedures, reference info (UI and dialog box help) and glossary items. We developed a simple hypertext strategy with non-negotiable rules for what should link to what — and when. (Ended up with a nice triangle graphic for a cheatsheet.) It worked so well that I wrote and delivered a help standards paper for ACM in…. 1993. Still lives!
So, back to the DITA session, which was excellent — CM4 featuring IBM and Autodesk — two real-life and useful stories of implementers from the documentation trenches. Bill wrote about DITA in practice back in October, noting that Adobe techdoc”ers” are also DITA users.
And finally, back to the point of writing methdologies (aka content strategy component,) which I believe is one of the key drivers of the rapid adoption of DITA. DITA = topics = chunking. It is as much a methodology as it is a technology. Information Mapping, Inc., well-known to techdoc folks as a longtime proponent of information organization = usability, clearly agrees. They have rolled their methodology quite nicely into Content Mapper, blending DITA in as well. Their entry into the authoring software market, full of vendors with equally strong heritage, is a good sign for those following the pulse of ECM as strategy (more on that later.)
Takeaways? Information architecture is hot. Technical writer with online help expertise = DITA fan. Getting information from those in the trenches is key — check out What’s New at Gilbane.com and register for a discussion on real-world DITA adoption on January 11th.
I spent some time yesterday updating my eForms resources page, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of new resources out there. I had been thinking the interest had slowed down a bit, but clearly it hasn’t. And Happy Thanksgiving to our readers here in the states!
The announcement is just out so our detailed opinion will have to wait, but this is certainly major progress. See comments from Tim Bray, and Scoble’s interview with Jean Paoli.
Update: David Berlind has been following the OpenDocument Format debate very closely. See David’s reaction.
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