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Here’s a look at The DITA Writer’s interviews with two DITA pioneers

Are you braving the wilds of the web looking for information on DITA? This post covers some of the best caches of valuable DITA assets.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the history of DITA and where it came from. Today, I thought I would give you some information about DITA’s current caretakers.

One of the results of good technical documentation is reducing calls to your product’s help desk. DITA 1.3 has added new features to help you create better troubleshooting topics.

With DITA 1.3, you truly get three standards in one. This newly approved standard specifically contains three different editions, each tailored for a distinct audience.

The year 2015 saw two important milestones for DITA. June was the 10th anniversary of the approval of DITA 1.0 as an OASIS standard. And on December 17th, the latest standard 1.3, was approved.

Members of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee have recently approved a Special Majority Ballot to advance Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Version 1.3 as a Candidate OASIS Standard (COS).

One of the most useful features in DITA is Conditional Processing (or Profiling), which allows you to use the same set of source files to create different versions of your documentation by marking content so that you can filter out entire topics, paragraphs, sentences, and even words.

In earlier posts, I discussed the importance of the short description element (Big Rewards for a Short Description) and best practices for writing the descriptions (Best Practices for the Short Description Element). This post discusses the importance of tailoring your short description for the type of topic you are writing.

Writing text for the <shortdesc> element is easy. Writing good text for the <shortdesc> tag is hard. And if you don’t write good text, you are doing your readers and your document a disservice.

In my previous post Big Rewards for a Short Description, I talked about the importance of the short description element. Effective short descriptions are an opportunity to help users easily find the correct information for which they are looking. Keep the following best practices in mind when writing your short descriptions.

One of the most common mistakes organizations make when converting to DITA is to not properly train their writers.