One of the final technical communications conferences in the fall is the biggest: tcworld which draws in over 4,000 attendees, mostly from Germany and across Europe. I came to the conference with some trepidation given that, last year, DITA experts and vendors attending the show got a largely frosty reception, with German CCMS vendors bonding togetherRead More
This year’s Best Practices conference was held at in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the La Fonda Hotel, a grand old Pueblo-style hotel located in the heart of old Santa Fe. Anyone arriving to the conference early was treated to an open air market in the main square selling lots of turquoise jewelry, some veryRead More
Continuing from the previous article in this series, the interview with Don Day and Michael Priestley continues as we delve further into how a proto-DITA was developed within IBM, and the process that led to it being released to the open standards community via OASIS. DITAWriter: Could you tell me about the path that wouldRead More
As a way to celebrate what was the 10th anniversary of the DITA standard in 2015, I did a series of interviews with people who were there at the very beginning. Two of these key people were (and are) Don Day and Michael Priestley. Formerly with IBM, Don Day is now a DITA and XMLRead More
[This article was original published in two parts on the IXIASOFT website back in April 2016. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2. This version on DITAWriter adds some minor updates and brings the two pieces together as a single article. I have also back-dated this blog closer to the time of the conference, purely forRead More
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on February 5, 2016. It is reproduced here with permission]. Troubleshooting has been around as long as humans have been tinkering with the gadgets they have created. I don’t doubt that the person who invented the wheel was given plenty of advice from others theRead More
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on December 10, 2015. It is reproduced here with permission]. Last week I had the honor of presenting the keynote at DITA Festa Tokyo 2015. Here are a few things I learned while I was there: 1. There is significant interest in DITA within Japan.Read More
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on November 19, 2015. It is reproduced here with permission] 1. tcworld is the largest technical communications conference in the world Actually I knew this fact when heading over to Stuttgart, Germany, but it really only hit home when I first saw the conference hall.Read More
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on July 27, 2015. It is reproduced here with permission]. This is the first in a series of articles examining aspects of DITA 1.3, aimed at content creators and information architects. Please note that the information that follows is based on the draft DITA 1.3Read More
Recently I was made aware of a new online-based XML editor: Xeditor. Developed by appsoft, it is a web browser-based works XML that works with DITA and other XML standards. I was given a demo of the product by Anthony Apodaca and developer Thomas Werzmirzowsky, demonstrating to me that it is another potential tool contentRead More
