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Improving Relationships in Relationship Tables
A team encounters quite a few challenges when transitioning from unstructured to structured writing. For my team, the struggles associated with learning DITA and following the DITA structure were minor compared with the challenges presented by corralling hundreds of individual topics into a logical hierarchy. The biggest challenge we faced was managing topic relationships.
In DITA, related topics can be managed either in the DITA topics themselves, or via DITAMAPs using relationship tables <reltable>.
Documentation and Training West 2008
Documentation and Training Life Sciences
Bob Doyle
Plugin Tutorials
A recent thread on the dita-users list discussed specialization as an extension of the DITA OT by restrictive substitution. This is best done by creating a DITA-OT plugin.
Plugins are overrides to the OT code that add functionality. Plugins are used to add new specializations to the OT and to define new specialization targets for output processing of the specialized elements. If they are designed properly, plugins can be added to an upgraded version of the OT and still run properly.
Bob Doyle
What does Wiki have to do with DITA?
The Central Texas DUG presentations on Wikis and DITA, and Eric Arnstrong's excellent review of the benefits of structured formats and DITA compared to alternatives like a Wiki, raises the question of whether we are perhaps trying to force DITA into too many places.
Eric focused in on the reason structured formats are difficult to use - they force you to learn the tagging structure (DITA has about 120 tags, DocBook 800, and XHTML only about 80).
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