When you’re coming up with a metadata strategy for your content, you should start by developing a taxonomy, or a hierarchy used to organize metadata. A taxonomy will help shape your metadata strategy and make implementation of that strategy possible. In this follow-up post to Making metadata in DITA work for you, you’ll learn some tips for creating a taxonomy that will succeed in helping your audience—both internal and external—find what they need.
This year’s tekom/tcworld conference reinforced the ongoing doctrinal chasm between North American technical communication and German technical communication.
I am speaking, of course, of the proper role of DITA in technical communication. If any.
For some content developers—especially those using DITA for the first time—any features of DITA that go beyond the basics can seem intimidating. But sometimes, a special feature of DITA might be exactly what an organization needs to solve one of its content problems and save money. Features like conref push, subject scheme, and the learning and training specialization could play a powerful role in your content strategy—and they’re not as difficult to use as you might think.
Thanks to everyone who has signed up for LearningDITA.com and taken the free Introduction to DITA course. The introductory course offers a high-level overview of DITA.
Want a deeper dive into the DITA information types (concept, topic, reference, and glossary)? Today, we are releasing our second course on the DITA concept topic. The course and supporting videos were created by a Scriptorium team led by Gretyl Kinsey (with help from Simon Bate, Jake Campbell, and me).
One of the major challenges in implementing DITA projects is training. Although we (and others) offer fabulous live, instructor-led training, there is also a need for asynchronous learning–where can a student go to learn DITA independently? To address this need, Scriptorium is starting an open-source effort to develop training content for DITA.
This post provides an overview of techniques you can use to handle conditional content in DITA. The need for complex conditions is a common reason organizations choose DITA as their content model. As conditional requirements get more complex, the basic Show/Hide functionality offered in many desktop publishing tools is no longer sufficient.
Conditional processing is especially interesting–or maybe problematic—when you combine it with reuse requirements. You identify a piece of content that could be reused except for one small bit that needs to be different in the two reuse scenarios.
How can you implement DITA content strategy? Is DITA itself a content strategy?
A DITA implementation isn’t merely a matter of picking tools. Several factors, including wrangling the different groups affected by an implementation, are critical to successfully managing DITA projects.
Note: This post assumes you have already done a content strategy analysis, which determined the DITA standard supports your company’s business goals.
or, What you need to know before you start working on a DITA to InDesign project.
Because the phrase “best practices” is boring, we provide, for your reading pleasure, the ten commandments of DITA.
