The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has gone live with it's new Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) Web site, a DITA-based application that provides all of the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP) standards through dynamic delivery of DITA-based content.

I have written up a deeper discussion of the project here: http://blog.reallysi.com/2008/01/live-dita-appli.html

The ASC site itself is here: http://asc.fasb.org/home

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In a talk at the TCANZ conference in New Zealand in September, Rob Houser explained that Microsoft's approach to user assistance separated UA into "primary" and "secondary". Primary UA is information users don't need to ask for. Secondary UA requires the user to interact before the information will appear. So screen titles, labels, wizard tasks, and other UX devices that help the user understand how to use the application form primary UA.

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Is Help sufficiently different from other forms of documentation that it should warrant a specialised DITA? Specialisation tends to be vertical (industry-specific) rather than horizontal (domain-specific). Single-sourcing makes a lot of sense if the Help is viewed as one possible output. A Help specialisation might make single-sourcing of manuals, Web and Help content difficult, although it might make the production of a suite of Help systems easier.

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