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"Once you start down the DITA path, forever will it dominate your destiny"
Thursday, January 03, 2008 — posted by Sarah
Eliot Kimber has a lovely article on using DITA for narrative documents. I'm trundling through it, nodding in agreement, and then we have this horror:[...] DITA offers at least two compelling advantages over any other candidate XML application:Now, he does qualify this statement by saying that these assertions apply only if DITA is a reasonable fit for your problem. But the overall thrust of the argument appears to be that since DITA can do narrative documents (which it was emphatically not designed for), it can potentially be applied to an enormous new set of content.
- The initial cost of ownership is low, approaching zero, and the ongoing cost of ownership is low.
- It offers a number of sophisticated features in terms of modularity, extensibility, and linking that either are not provided by other applications or would cost a prohibitively large amount to build from scratch.
That is, the cost of applying DITA is almost always going to be significantly lower than the cost of any alternative (and at worst will be no more expensive than any other alternative).
Ugh.
Before I begin today's DITA-bashing session, I need to point out that we are currently using DITA for several projects here at Scriptorium. DITA slices! DITA dices! DITA advocacy raises your IQ, improves your health, and makes you irresistible. I like DITA just fine.
Moving right along...
"1. The initial cost of ownership is low, approaching zero, and the ongoing cost of ownership is low."
Just because it's free doesn't mean it's cheap. The default output from the DITA Open Toolkit ranges somewhere between unattractive (HTML) and fugly (PDF). If you care about the appearance of your final documents, you are going to have to do a lot of work to get the look and feel you want. And although the OT offers a starting point, customizing it is kind of like a trip to the dentist. The impacted-wisdom-tooth-removing kind of trip.
Getting your output working properly is Not Easy because of the, er, unique design of the OT. If the set of tags you need is small, you might be better off building a nice petite NovelML and then writing the transformations you need for NovelML instead of wrestling with DITA's complexities.
"2. It offers a number of sophisticated features in terms of modularity, extensibility, and linking that either are not provided by other applications or would cost a prohibitively large amount to build from scratch."
I agree that DITA has some lovely features in this area. However, I fail to see how they apply to the example at hand -- a narrative document such as Moby Dick. If you need modularity, extensibility, and linking features, you should consider DITA. If you don't, then these features will just get in the way.
That is, the cost of applying DITA is almost always going to be significantly lower than the cost of any alternative (and at worst will be no more expensive than any other alternative).If DITA is overkill for your requirements, then applying DITA may not be cheaper.
But the issue that upsets me the most is this: when you attack a problem by assuming (or hoping) that DITA will work, you necessarily look for DITA features you can use. You may not think carefully about non-DITA features that you might like to have. For fiction content, I can think of several things that would be quite useful (and for which DITA offers no immediate support):
- For a book that is part of a series (like a science fiction trilogy), a listing of the entire series and an indication of where the current book falls in the series.
- Metadata to identify the point of view. Many novels switch from one narrator to another, or from a first-person point of view to an omniscient point of view. It would be lovely to filter the content to see only the first-person content (after reading the book from cover to cover as the author intended).
- Similarly, metadata that helps with scene location and time could be invaluable for studying literature written with numerous flashbacks. The Time Traveler's Wife and anything by Jasper Fforde come to mind.
- The ability to index by character occurrence. This is more often seen in nonfiction books, especially biographies. But imagine scanning the entire Harry Potter series for scenes with Severus Snape to determine whether his ultimate allegiance was consistent.
As Eliot says, the advantages of DITA can be significant. But I fear that a generation of documents will be crammed into DITA, resulting in documents that are not as well structured as they need to be.
I will now await my smackdown from the DITA Disciples.
Signed,
DITA Dissident
9:44 PM Permalink |
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