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
Category: Articles
Feature articles by DITAWriter or by other contributors.
Agile Documentation Management at Best Practices 2016
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
Highlights from DITA North America 2016
[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
Getting Out of Trouble: DITA 1.3 Troubleshooting
[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
Five Takeaways from DITA Festa Japan 2015
[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
3 Things I Learned at tekom tcworld 2015
[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
Turning the Tables with DITA 1.3
[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
Observations from DITA North America 2015, Pt 2
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on June 11, 2015 as “What Can We Expect with DITA 1.3?“. It is reproduced here with permission]. The top-of-mind question for nearly everybody at this year’s CMS/DITA North America conference was: “What can we expect with DITA 1.3?” 2015 marks the 10th anniversary ofRead More
Observations from DITA North America 2015, Pt 1
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on May 28, 2015 as “Are DITA Implementations Getting Easier?“. It is reproduced here with permission]. The largest single DITA event in the world is Content Management Strategies/DITA North America (CMS/DITA NA), and this year’s conference in Chicago did not disappoint. While there are largerRead More
Gnostyx DITA 1.2 (and 1.3) Demonstration Documents
While there are a lot of code snippets and demos that look at aspects of writing DITA, it is still exceedingly rare to find good, publicly-available source code examples of entire documents written in DITA. That’s why I thought it worth mentioning Gnostyx‘s recent posting to GitHub: a demonstration document written in DITA, with aRead More