Current Practices and Trends in Technical and Professional Communication was published earlier this week in the U.K. by ISTC. Edited by Professor Stephen Crabbe, it is a book that surveys the current state of technical authoring. I was asked to contribute a chapter to the publication, which focused on DITA. My chapter is called “TheRead More
I will be covering all of the points in this article and more in a webinar presentation on DITA and SEO at CIDM’s online IDEAS Summer Online Conference on July 25, 2017. I hope to see you there! There’s a joke making the rounds that goes like this: where is the best place to hideRead More
There are many key factors that make DITA-based technical documentation complementary to Agile-based product development. Here are 10 reasons, among many, why DITA and Agile make a great partnership: Topic-based approach in DITA assists with incremental development: One of the tenets of DITA is content reuse, encouraging technical writers to “write once, use many”. ThisRead More
Sometimes it seems like you have to travel far in order to meet your neighbours. I had that experience recently went I went to the STC conference in Washington, D.C., and got reacquainted with “Single Sourceror” Rob Hanna of Precision Content, who lives in the same city that I do (Toronto). While I’ve known RobRead More
Here’s something I think needs to be more widely known: sample DITA files mimicking a professional manual set for a fictitious product called Thunderbird. I’ve been using this example code for a couple of years now in demos and for presentations, and there’s at least one person in every audience I show this to whoRead More
Not too long ago the second edition of the popular DITA for Print was published by XML Press. While she is a colleague of mine at IXIASOFT, she lives and works in the States and we don’t get the opportunity to meet and talk as much as I would like. Luckily, we had the opportunityRead More
My work for IXIASOFT includes being a company liaison for OASIS, the open standards body that produces the DITA specification. One of the groups I actively work with there is the DITA Adoption Committee, that I now chair, accompanied by Stan Doherty as secretary. Its goals are to help inform the DITA community on bestRead More
My main source for finding new companies to add to my list of companies that use DITA on the DITAWriter website is LinkedIn. In order to answer the question: “where are DITA users located across the world?”, for the past few years I have done a broad search asking how many individuals claimed “DITA XML”Read More
This is part two of a series of articles examining the issues DITA users are talking about at the DITA Listening Sessions being held by the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. Just few weeks ago I attended (virtually) two additional DITA Listening Sessions that occurred in the Seattle area. Each session is unique, in that itRead More
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
