more thoughts on DITA from CMS 2006

a few more stray thoughts about my CMS 2006 experience...

Keep pushing topics

There's still a lot of need to keep pushing the topic-based paradigm. The book-oriented focus still reigns supreme for a lot of content developers and deliverers. Though more people "get" it than don't, there's plenty of pressure to relax the topic-based approach and allow for creating content with chapter-length topics with deeply nested sections and relaxed typing. We need to learn how to manage this, so that DITA *can* effectively extend its reach beyond technical docs, but also keep the virtues of topic-based, structured semantics in place.

Increasingly deep vendor support for DITA

XML editing, CMS vendors, and consultants continue to invest heavily in support for DITA. Vendors include Astoria, BlastRadius (XMetaL editor), Cignex, DocZon, Idiom, Innodata Isogen, nSight, PTC (Arbortext Epic editor), Quadralay, SiberLogic, Trisoft, Vasont, XyEnterprise.Task Modeler very popular

IBM Task Modeler - Download it today!

On the heels of the excellent sessions from Andrea Ames, Jennifer Fell, and Carolyn Henry on DITA and map-driven IA, my demo of using Task Modeler for DITA IA as part of the Technical Track generated lots of enthusiasm.  I encouraged all to download the alphaworks version and provide feedback - http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/taskmodeler.

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