Feature articles by DITAWriter or by other contributors.
For just shy of six years, I have been keeping track of the number of technical writer job postings on indeed.com—the largest job aggregator website in the United States. With the exception of a brief surge in technical writing job postings in late 2015/early 2016, there has been a steady decline in technical writer jobRead More
I believe that one of the best ways people learn is to get “hands on” and play with things at the code level in order to get a real understanding as to how things are supposed to work. That’s the approach I took when devising a set of Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) code samples, which areRead More
While I get a lot of conference invitations, I was particularly intrigued when I received an invitation out-of-the-blue to present at the SIGDOC 2017 conference in Halifax. SIGDOC (which stands for “Special Interest Group on Design of Communication”) is a conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is considered to be primarilyRead More
I and some of my colleagues have run into a few people at recent conferences who have been asking me how soon DITA 2.0 was coming and whether they should hold off moving to DITA until its arrival. While I understand where this type of question is coming from, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding asRead More
Current Practices and Trends in Technical and Professional Communication was published earlier this week in the U.K. by ISTC. Edited by Professor Stephen Crabbe, it is a book that surveys the current state of technical authoring. I was asked to contribute a chapter to the publication, which focused on DITA. My chapter is called “TheRead More
I will be covering all of the points in this article and more in a webinar presentation on DITA and SEO at CIDM’s online IDEAS Summer Online Conference on July 25, 2017. I hope to see you there! There’s a joke making the rounds that goes like this: where is the best place to hideRead More
There are many key factors that make DITA-based technical documentation complementary to Agile-based product development. Here are 10 reasons, among many, why DITA and Agile make a great partnership: Topic-based approach in DITA assists with incremental development: One of the tenets of DITA is content reuse, encouraging technical writers to “write once, use many”. ThisRead More
Here’s something I think needs to be more widely known: sample DITA files mimicking a professional manual set for a fictitious product called Thunderbird. I’ve been using this example code for a couple of years now in demos and for presentations, and there’s at least one person in every audience I show this to whoRead More
My work for IXIASOFT includes being a company liaison for OASIS, the open standards body that produces the DITA specification. One of the groups I actively work with there is the DITA Adoption Committee, that I now chair, accompanied by Stan Doherty as secretary. Its goals are to help inform the DITA community on bestRead More
My main source for finding new companies to add to my list of companies that use DITA on the DITAWriter website is LinkedIn. In order to answer the question: “where are DITA users located across the world?”, for the past few years I have done a broad search asking how many individuals claimed “DITA XML”Read More
