This morning we discussed DITA feature design for DITA 1.1, and this afternoon I spent brushing up on my DITA authoring workshop, which I'm delivering tomorrow. It's a bit of a weird feeling: one eye on the future, as the Technical Committee expands DITA's capabilities for book publishing and conditional processing; and one eye on the present, making sure that DITA still fits into best practices and processes that can deliver improved quality, not just reduced cost.  DITA is good technology, but all it can do is reduce the pain of doing the right thing: it can't do the right thing for you.

How come I can still get jetlag traveling in the same timezone? What a dismal talent to have.

I'm definitely looking forward to the workshop tomorrow, in a slightly jittery, stage-frightey kind of way. I've given the workshop at least a dozen times now, but it's not the content that gives the payoff, it's the way people react to it: connecting the dots between the way DITA works and the way they work. And seeing people make use of DITA, after spending six years of my life working on it, is a very welcome validation.

Six years is a long time. It's longer than I spent in high-school, and at the time that took forever. 

 I know this a rather informal post to start my first blog with, but I'll come back and introduce myself properly later. First I've got a conference to go to.

From DITA 2006,

-- Michael Priestley