DITA: What’s Working and What Isn’t

The OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee regularly solicits input from organizations that have adopted and implemented DITA to understand what’s working well and what isn’t. Here are some of the things noted that you might want to be aware of.

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DITA: What’s Working and What Isn’t

[THUMBS UP] DITA Can Leverage All of XML’s Advantages
DITA is a powerful tool for reuse and referencing, with topics used in multiple deliverables translated only one and only modified topics requiring updates.

[THUMBS DOWN] Difficult to Customize Beyond What’s Built In
When using DITA Open Toolkit to publish content, it is difficult to create customizations to DTDs and transforms without expert knowledge of XSLTs.

[THUMBS UP] Topics Can Be as Specific as Needed
The DITA Maturation Model contains topic types such as Concept, Troubleshooting, Task and Reference, as well as allowing for generic topics without a specific information type.

[THUMBS DOWN] DITA as a Standard is not Evolving Fast Enough
There is a sense that metadata was designed for static output; DITA has not evolved to properly address dynamic output, and new features can take years to incorporate into a new version.