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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. Content is marked in a way 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. I’m not talking about DITA training. The training that is missed is the reason for DITA—that is, topic-based authoring. Writers that are well-trained in topic-based authoring will appreciate the benefits of DITA.