This book presents a concise, real-world description of DITA principles. Explanations are provided on the basis of simple, applicable examples. The book will be an excellent introduction for DITA novices and is ideal as a first orientation for optimizing your information environment.
As more companies implement DITA to streamline the development of technical content, the demand for DITA-literate technical communicators is growing. The DITA Style Guide: Best Practices for Authors provides comprehensive, practical explanations of DITA elements and attributes. Real-world examples and clear recommendations show you how to create consistent, semantically correct DITA content.
&>The Start-to-Finish, Best-Practice Guide to Implementing and Using DITA Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is today's most powerful toolbox for constructing information. By implementing DITA, organizations can gain more value from their technical documentation than ever before. Now, three DITA pioneers offer the first complete roadmap for successful DITA adoption, implementation, and usage. Drawing on years of experience helping large organizations adopt DITA, the authors answer crucial questions the "official" DITA documents ignore, including: Where do you start? What should you know up front? What are the pitfalls in implementing DITA? How can you avoid those pitfalls? The authors begin with topic-based writing, presenting proven best practices for developing effective topics and short descriptions. Next, they address content architecture, including how best to set up and implement DITA maps, linking strategies, metadata, conditional processing, and content reuse. Finally, they offer "in the trenches" solutions for ensuring quality implementations, including guidance on content conversion. Coverage includes: Knowing how and when to use each DITA element-and when not to Writing "minimalist," task-oriented information that quickly meets users' needs Creating effective task, concept, and reference topics for any product, technology, or service Writing effective short descriptions that work well in all contexts Structuring DITA maps to bind topics together and provide superior navigation Using links to create information webs that improve retrievability and navigation Gaining benefits from metadata without getting lost in complexity Using conditional processing to eliminate redundancy and rework Systematically promoting reuse to improve quality and reduce costs Planning, resourcing, and executing effective content conversion Improving quality by editing DITA content and XML markup If you're a writer, editor, information architect, manager, or consultant who evaluates, deploys, or uses DITA, this book will guide you all the way to success. Also see the other books in this IBM Press series: Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors The IBM Style Guide: Conventions for Writers and Editors
Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA documents the evolution of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) – a widely used open standard for structuring technical content. DITA has grown in popularity and features since its origins as an internal grammar for structuring technical documentation at IBM. This book introduces Lightweight DITA (LwDITA, which should be read as "Lightweight DITA") as a proposed version of the DITA standard that reduces its dependence on complex Extensible Markup Language (XML) structures and simplifies its authoring experience. This volume aims to reconcile discrepancies and similarities in methods for authoring content in industry and academia and does so by reporting on DITA’s evolution through the lens of computational thinking, which has been connected in scholarship and media to initiatives for learning to code and programming. Evia’s core argument is that if technical communicators are trained with principles of rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking, they can create structured content in lightweight workflows with XML, HTML5, and Markdown designed to reduce the learning curve associated with DITA and similar authoring methodologies. At the same time, this book has the goal of making concepts of structured authoring and intelligent content easier to learn and teach in humanities-based writing and communication programs. This book is intended for practitioners and students interested in structured authoring or the DITA standard.
In recent years Extensible Markup Language (XML) has had a major impact on software development and data interchange and has begun to have a similar effect in technical communication. This resource fills an important gap in the market by providing a broad introduction to XML and its role in technical communication.
XML-based Content Management: Integration, Methodologies and Tools covers the design and deployment of XML-based solutions and how to manage content and metadata, a practice that requires a more methodological approach than those traditionally applied to the design and deployment of document and content management solutions. The extensive use of XML implies the need of adding additional activities, quality controls, and tools to the established document-management and web-application design processes. The book describes a methodology that covers the different phases of the content and metadata management lifecycle, from generation, to archiving, to compliance with existing content management and archiving standards. In addition, the book reviews the key characteristics of the tools necessary for storage, retrieval and delivery. - Focuses on methodologies for the design and deployment of XML-based content management solutions based on standards like BMPN and SPEM - Provides an updated view of consolidated technologies for structured data management - Explains the link between technologies for content storage and distribution - Presents the conceptual knowledge to understand and relate the strategic view provided by OAIS with the management of daily operations focused on content collection, aggregation and publishing
Current Practices and Trends in Technical and Professional Communication is a valuable source of collective knowledge from our community of practice. Experienced practitioners and innovators (from the UK and international) are sharing what they know for the benefit of both the communicator and the end user.
The second edition of DITA for Print shows how to create a PDF plugin for the DITA Open Toolkit, version 2. Contains examples you can use to create a complete plugin.
XProc 3.0 is a programming language for processing XML, JSON, and other documents in pipelines. XProc chains conversions and other steps, allowing for potentially complex processing. XProc is especially useful for applications, such as publishing, where content may come from multiple input sources, pass through multiple processing steps and result in multiple output streams. XProc 3.0 Programmer Reference is aimed at programmers and others who process XML. It explains the language in detail, provides examples, and contains a set of example use cases. Anyone who uses the XProc language will find a wealth of information in this book.