Submit your quality contributions to the newly launched DITA Maturity Model Community (MMC) from 1 June – 31 August 2008, and you could win an 8GB Apple iPod Touch and two
tickets to DocTrain East.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture and its committee members always features heavily at the X-Pubs annual conference.  This year is no exception!

Here are some DITA-related highlights from this year’s Free Workshops and Presentations:

(Remember: Discounts are available for groups, and through various sponsors and speakers.  2008 presents free workshops with unprecedented educational value.  Call +44 208 722 8400 and ask for X-Pubs for more information.)

DITA Users is holding a lottery for free tickets to major conferences featuring DITA next month, including:

• the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies conference June 18-20 in San Francisco, CA
• the X-Pubs conference June 22-24 in London, England
• the new DocTrain Life Sciences conference June 23-26 in Indianapolis, Indiana

These free tickets are worth from 384 British Pounds to $999 and are an exclusive benefit for paying members of DITA Users. See Why Join DITA Users.

The April 2008 issue of STC's Intercom magazine is packed with interesting articles about DITA. The contents can be found here:

http://www.stc.org/intercom/index.04.2008.asp

Whilst some of the articles are acccessible only by members, the STC have kindly made an article about DITA & Wikis freely available:

http://www.stc.org/intercom/PDFs/2008/200804_18-21.pdf

While a remarkable amount of both ink and electronic bandwidth have been expended upon the use of XML in the data realm, there are times where it is necessary to step back for a bit and look at what and where XML is being used today. One thing that becomes obvious when studying the XML landscape is that a significant amount of XML is still being used for purposes of describing narrative, for telling a story, advising people in the use of a product, structuring reports, and doing other things that focus more on documents than they do on data.