Michael Priestley's blog

Of conferences and webinars on lightweight DITA and such

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Fri, 2014-04-18 14:10. Last updated on Fri, 2014-04-18 14:21.

First a link to the presentation on DITA and marketing content I co-presented at Intelligent Content:

http://www.slideshare.net/IntelligentContent/dita-for-marketing-content

And then a heads-up that I'll be giving a more detailed overview of lightweight DITA at a webinar on May 14th:

http://www.congility.com/webinar/xdita-and-hdita-marrying-lightweight-di...

And finally, I'll be presenting at the Congility conference in the UK June 18-20. You can get 30% off the registration by using this code:

MPR14SPK

Overview of Lightweight DITA (XDITA and HDITA)

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Fri, 2014-04-11 16:36. Last updated on Tue, 2014-05-06 14:38.

The goal of this proposal is to align a lightweight DITA profile in XML with an equivalent markup specification based on HTML5. This is not a complete specification, just something to start the discussion going. There's still lots of room for change, as well as for adding specific mappings for additional semantics for learning and training content, epubs, or other formats.

DITA metrics at the CMS/DITA 2013 conference

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Thu, 2013-05-16 18:15. Last updated on Thu, 2013-05-16 18:20.

I attended several sessions on metrics, including the conference keynote, and a few key points jumped out at me:

The wrong metrics can be worse than no metrics at all
Metrics should be stable over time to allow for tracking
Start by figuring out what decisions you need to make – then gather the metrics you need to make that decision

Read more

Lightweight DITA at CMS/DITA North America 2013

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Thu, 2013-05-02 19:36. Last updated on Thu, 2013-05-02 19:57.

Two weeks after the fact, I'm still processing stuff I learned at the conference. Over two and a half days with four tracks of presentations, there wasn't a single hour when I didn't want to be in at least two places at once.

I'm told there were over 350 attendees from 17 countries around the world, many of them new to DITA. The conference provided incredible depth of technical content, but will definitely need more introductory sessions or workshops next year as well to balance things out. The community is growing!

Lightweight DITA

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Fri, 2013-04-05 19:33. Last updated on Tue, 2013-04-16 11:55.

The lightweight DITA proposal for DITA 1.3 is starting to come together. The proposal responds to requirements from the community for a lightweight version of DITA to ease adoption by groups who don't need all the features of full DITA.