Where Does DITA XML Fit When it Comes to Tech Writing Tool Use?

5 thoughts on “Where Does DITA XML Fit When it Comes to Tech Writing Tool Use?”

1. Hi Keith,

   I wanted to pipe in to say that this jives with our experience as well.

   However, I think this has a lot to do with the specific conference you were at, but does raise the general question of how fast DITA is realistically going to penetrate the ‘mass market’ in as much as there is such a thing as the mass techcomm market…

   My belief is there are these contributing factors:

   1) UA conferences, I have found at least, cover more of the software and web world. General Tech Comms conferences cover a more even spread of software vs. hardware (and if my gut is correct, actually a majority of hardware). Software and web companies can often survive smaller, with lower overheads, turnover (in terms of revenue) and headcount than hardware companies.

   The hardware world might also be losing ground to competition from the East, but software and web is still very much a global hotbed. This means you end up with more small teams and independents at UA conferences.

   2) DITA is something that very small teams and independent contract authors don’t often implement. If you’ve got no IT support and little budget, the learning curve and cost of DITA tools is still too high for many.

   3) DITA is often driven by need to reuse content, localise it, or multiformat publish it. Although I have no idea about the stats on reuse and localisation (I have some ideas but none I’d publically put in writing), on the multiformat, it’s definitely been my finding that software and web companies are happy with one format of output (either CHM or HTML) and high-quality print or others are are a ‘nice to have’.

   This was indirectly a point of discussion in the panel at Congility 2011 actually. The question was what is holding DITA back most? One of the most common answers was creating output stylesheets easily.

   As it stands, as much as I think DITA is firmly the way of the future, it’s firmly the way of the future for organisations that are industrialising their process and need economies of scale. When you scale back the situation, you scale back the drivers too, thinning the whole business case.

   I often compare it to an assembly line vs. traditional manufacturing. Obviously the assembly line is how any business must scale and accelerate production, and we should all learn from that way of thinking and planning, BUT if you don’t need to scale production, the expense and planning required to set one up is prohibitive to the small team or independent.

   That said, if you’re a whiz with HTML and CSS, stylesheets and don’t mind tweaking things a bit yourself, a one-man-band can easily benefit from DITA. Problem is, asking for those skills in a technical writer competent enough in the other required skills is often asking a lot.

   Sad? Maybe. But true? I’d be interested in other opinions.

   —

   Noz – http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com // @nozurbina

   1. Thanks for the thoughtful response Noz!

      I think you are correct on all of your points, and it reflects my experience in meeting with people at various conferences as well.

      There definitely is a “techcomms market” as you put it out there, and I think the UA Writer’s survey serves to highlight who the major players in this market are. What you do not see in these surveys are any of the large Content Management System software vendors listed, and I am guessing that this is because the extent to their penetration into this market space still has a considerable way to go. The equivalent UA Writer’s survey for this year is already out, and there are some interesting trends which suggest that DITA is slowly making steps in this direction (which I will cover in a future article here).

      I believe you are correct in saying that DITA is still too complicated for very small technical communication teams to deploy, especially if there is no support from IT (and less so if there’s no support for the initiative from upper management). As it stands, a one-person team looking to work with DITA either has to go with the standard output from the DITA-OT, or learn about XSL, ant and possibly Java to be able to tweak things to their specific needs. And this is on top of learning all there is about the DITA tag-set itself. These are subjects I also hope to tackle in future articles here as well.

      Would love to hear other people’s experiences in this area as well — if there’s anyone else out there who wants to share their experiences, please add your comments! (It’ll help me decide what sort of articles to write in the future, if that helps!)

      Keith Schengili-Roberts – DITAWriter

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3. XMetaL and Arbortext are also catching up fast as far as DITA XML authoring in concerned. Abobe got late in the game, but is now aggressive.

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