Just an update on my activities:

• Presenting at the STC conference May 7th-10th, giving an intro to DITA presentation, co-presenting on task-oriented information architecture with DITA, and also participating in the standards forum to represent DITA and OASIS. For more info: http://stc.org/53rdConf/
• Presenting at X-Pubs in England June 20th-21st, giving an intro to DITA presentation, specialization demo, and DITA integration presentation. For more info: http://www.x-pubs.com/
• Ordered some DITA OASIS gear at http://www.cafepress.com/oasis_open, hoping to show it off at the aforementioned events.

On the DITA TC front, working hard on the conditional processing feature right now, trying to get to a design we can all agree on for managing the creation of new conditional processing attributes via specialization.

Monday 17 April -- Leaving for Shanghai

In 2005, I conducted a benchmark study of the state of technical writing in China. The white paper of this study and our updated India benchmark study is now available on the CIDM website at www.infomanagementcenter.com/publications.htm. Also notice the new website that we launched last week.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Shanghai for a few days, in part to speak at the LISA Shanghai conference (Localization Industry Standards Association). Dave Schell and I are introducing DITA. I'm also meeting with a Chinese company that will be implementing DITA. I expect many of the discussions at the conference and at the company will focus on the challenge of topic-based authoring. Localization service providers are concerned that handling multiple topics will increase the difficulty of administering the translation workflow.

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The CMS 2006 conference in April in San Francisco showed the energy and enthusiasm that DITA is helping to build for structured content and topic-based authoring, as well as support for content management. We had about 325 people at the conference with about 100 or so attending the DITA track each hour.

We're now planning for DITA Europe the first week in November in Frankfurt. I'd like to hear from interested people in Europe about taking part. We should have a call for papers on the conference website soon.

I'm pleased with the reception of the new DITA User Guide, now being shipped. It will be listed on Amazon soon but is now available on the Comtech web site at http://www.comtech-serv.com/dita.shtml

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Gee, I'm observing in my first several blog posts here, that I'm spending more time worrying about fonts and presentation than my content.

Where's that DITA backend we need for wikis and blogs?

(as I wonder how this one will look after submitted...)

John

It's been great to read the blog posts from CMS 2006 - I was there in 2005, when DITA had its first full track at a conference, and the excitement was building then. It's amazing how far we've come in just a year: from one or two CMS vendors with DITA support to all of them! Although I suspect that as with the editors, the level of support varies, and features will continue to improve over time: typically supporting topics first, then maps, and finally specialization. Still, the level of focus on DITA as a common standard across CMSs is amazing, and one year since the standard was published is a very fast time to achieve consensus in an industry.

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