Demystifying content modeling
Content modeling may be the least understood part of structured content—which is saying something. Content modeling is the process of mapping your information’s implicit organization onto an explicit definition.
Tag: dita
The pros and cons of markdown (podcast, part 2)
In episode 98 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech continue their discussion about the pros and cons of markdown.
“If you want to make a website and you need to write the text in a fast way that does not involve adding a lot of the brackets that are in HTML syntax, I think that’s the main use for markdown.”
–Dr. Carlos Evia
The pros and cons of markdown (podcast, part 1)
In episode 97 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech discuss the pros and cons of markdown.
“I think markdown has a huge user base because most people need to develop content for the web. But there’s a set of people that need to be working in something more structured for a variety of reasons, and those are the ones who use DITA.”
–Dr. Carlos Evia
Integrating technical and marketing content for maximum impact
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
DITA 2.0: What to expect (podcast)
In episode 95 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kris Eberlein (chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee) discuss the upcoming release of 2.0. What can you expect if you are currently in DITA? And what do you need to know if you are considering DITA?
“If you’ve been shoehorning diagnostic information into troubleshooting topics, you’re going to have a good semantic place to put that content with DITA 2.0.”
–Kris Eberlein
DITA to PowerPoint: Exploring the challenges
We’ve worked on a few DITA-to-PowerPoint projects. In some cases, the project sounded like a natural fit. In other cases, the fit was less than compelling. Even in projects that seemed to have a natural fit, we encountered bumps in the road with the DITA content, the design of the slide masters, or both.
There are many good reasons to create a DITA-to-PowerPoint conversion. It’s an attractive idea to use the same material for slides and student materials (such as handouts). A DITA-to-PowerPoint conversion also allows you to create slides by reusing content from your existing topics.
DITA for small teams (podcast)
In episode 93 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe talk about how to determine whether DITA XML is a good fit for smaller content requirements.
“Scalability or anticipated scale is actually a good reason to implement DITA for a small team.”
–Sarah O’Keefe
The misuse of metadata (podcast)
In episode 89 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow talk about strategies for avoiding the misuse of metadata and DITA XML-based content.
“The more you fine-tune how your content model needs to operate, the easier it’s going to be to move it forward over time. The more you start taking shortcuts and using metadata for purposes other than what it was intended for, the more problems you’re going to have.”
– Bill Swallow
DITA: The next generation (podcast)
In episode 83 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Jake Campbell talk about the next generation of DITA. What happens when you need to update your existing DITA structure?
“When you’re building everything out the first time around, you can do as much user acceptance testing as you want—but the best user acceptance testing is going to be live testing.”
—Jake Campbell
The true cost of quick fixes (podcast, part 2)
In episode 79 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion and talk about solutions to quick fixes.
“A big part of your content strategy should be how requests come in, how the timelines are built, and what you’re responding to and how you’re responding to them in the first place.”
—Bill Swallow
