Our DITA Conference agenda is just about complete.  Despite the tight economy, speakers have been great about offering their expertise, and their companies have agreed to cover their travel.  These generous folks include Kent Taylor, Mahesh Kumar Gupta, Leigh White, Mollye Barrett, Don Bridges, Betty Harvey, Kristen J. Eberlein, Mariana Alupului, Jeff Jagoda, Michael Beaver, Tricia York Garrett, Susan Carpenter, Brandy Byrd Gantt, Andy Lewis, Larry Kunz, Pam Noreault, Julio J. Vazquez, Karen Deen, Frances Overby, Jon Parsons, and Dorothy Hoskins.

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There has been some renewed discussion within the DITA Technical Committee on what it means to be "DITA conformant". It is timely that this topic has been resurrected, because many Help Authoring Tools are now claiming DITA support of some sort or another. A draft clause in the DITA 1.2 specification proposes that tools claiming DITA support must provide a conformance statement listing what DITA features they actually implement.

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The Summer XML Conference presentations were carefully selected to be highly technical, marketing fluff free, and presented by real users and technology experts.  Presentations are set up in 3 tracks, with keynotes each day.  Here is what you can expect. 

• Keynote: Survivor: XML (Leigh W. White, Allscripts)
• Introduction to XSLT Concepts (Debbie Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies)
• Introduction to DITA (Kristen James Eberlein, IBM)
• Ex-XHTML HTML (Doug Schepers, W3C)

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Thanks to Robert Anderson (Feature Request ID: 2698921) you can now add attributes to the body tag in HTML output.

I wanted to use the http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ code highlighter and was able to get the script calls in using args.hdf/hdr, and use outputclass=prettyprint into the codeblock tag. The last thing was to modify the body tag to run the script when the page loaded. I modified the XSL to make it conditional, so it didn't modify the tag on pages that didn't actually need the script:

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I am very excited about the new e-book we have produced for the Introduction to DITA. Those who already have a paper version might want to consider the electronic version to support cutting and pasting the XML markup. Others might find this an innovative way to get started using DITA in their organizations.

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