by Russell Kay, Computerworld
DITA was designed by a cross-company workgroup at IBM, with the aim of producing better help systems. Work began in 1999, and the group developed the architecture during 2000. In 2004, DITA was turned over to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development and adoption of electronic business standards. OASIS formed a DITA Technical Committee in 2004. A draft standard was proposed in early 2005, and Version 1.0 was officially adopted in mid-2005. Version 1.1 is due in mid-2007 and 1.2 in 2008.
Read the complete story.
DITA was designed by a cross-company workgroup at IBM, with the aim of producing better help systems. Work began in 1999, and the group developed the architecture during 2000. In 2004, DITA was turned over to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development and adoption of electronic business standards. OASIS formed a DITA Technical Committee in 2004. A draft standard was proposed in early 2005, and Version 1.0 was officially adopted in mid-2005. Version 1.1 is due in mid-2007 and 1.2 in 2008.
Read the complete story.
Deeper History
As part of that project we developed some of the core concepts that are central to DITA, including support for modularity, true use-by-reference (conref in DITA), sophisticated hyperlinking, and controlled extensibility (specialization in DITA). These concepts were implemented in IBM ID Doc but reflected SGML-era, standards (HyTime) and big-iron ways of thinking about and doing things.
Don and others had the insight with DITA to take the core concepts of IBM ID Doc, refine them to work well in the new XML and Web world, and marry them with solid technical writing practices of modularity and minimalism.
It's always pleased me that those things that I considered both innovative and essential in IBM ID Doc have found solid expression in DITA in a form that provides a much lower cost of entry than IBM ID Doc certainly did and makes this powerful technology available to anyone who wants to use it.
And we're still waiting for some features that were in BookMaster and BookManager (IBM's online, electronic delivery system for BookMaster documents) back in the mid 80's, such as implicit linking based on semantic markup and index entries.