Most organizations that regularly produce contracts or proposals should consider using XML, and in particular the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Why? These documents use the same or similar sections over and over again, with enough variations — such as customer names and select clauses — to become the basis of expensive horror stories when mistakes are made as a result of search-and-replace or copy-and-paste errors. New technologies based on DITA can significantly reduce the risk of mistakes, while saving time and stress for staff as well.

On June 10, 2010, instinctools GmbH organized a webinar on the topic “DITA Specialization: Tools for Visual Support”. 

In this webinar, Alexej Spas talked about how the otherwise complicated activity of DITA specialization can be handled comfortably in a visual way. The benefits of having infrastructure support for DITA specialization in terms of model validation, import, export and integration with version control and documentation environment were also talked about. The webinar was structured as follows: