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Resources provides a directory of educational materials and community-support tools for DITA.

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DITA Redux

Nearly two and a half years ago, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) officially approved the Darwin Information Typing Architecture Standard 1.0, completing the transition from many years of software development at IBM, reaching back to the mid-1990’s before the introduction of XML.

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DITA Resources from Arbortext

For a better understanding of DITA, please read the recent series of articles on DITA that were published in Arbortext's XML Publishing Network newsletter:

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DITA Success Story: ICOS Vision Systems and SiberSafe - An Interview with Patrick Willekens

In this exclusive interview with Scott Abel of TheContentWrangler.com, Patrick Willekens of ICOS Vision Systems shares lessons learned, success factors, and recommendations for others who are thinking of making a move to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).

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DITA TC FAQ about keys

The OASIS DITA Technical Committee has realized that parts of the DITA 1.2 specification do not unambigiously cover important questions about keys. We offer the following FAQ items in advance of an DITA 1.2 errata:

Q1: Given multiple key definitions, how does a processor determine which key definition is effective?

Q2: What should rendering tools display in the place of elements which have a keyref attribute?

 

Q1: Given multiple key definitions, how does a processor determine which key definition is effective?

 

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DITA Tools from A to Z

Authored by Bob Doyle, this article was published in the April 2008 issue of Intercom.

The article contains an overview of the key features of DITA tools: authoring tools, management tools, and publishing engines. Especially noteworthy are the matrixes which compare features -- including price -- of DITA editors and DITA content management systems (CMS).

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DITA topic specialization: Analyze your content and build a specialized DTD

Many resources are available to explain what Darwin Information Typing
Architecture (DITA) topic specialization is and the syntax to implement
it, but you still might be wondering "I have some content that might be a
candidate for topic specialization. What's next?" This tutorial
walks you through a series of steps to evaluate your content's suitability
for different DITA topic types, specialize one of those types, and test
your specialization using the DITA Open Toolkit.

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Do We Really Need All that Glue?

by JoAnn Hackos, PhD - President, Comtech Services and co-editor of DITA Specifications

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Enabling Collaborative Design-and-Decision Discussions, Online

by Eric Armstrong

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Free White Paper: Extreme DITA - Leveraging Extensibility to Deliver Solutions

This paper presents some of the implementation experiences that Stilo has had with DITA over the last couple of years. What emerges from this review is a ringing endorsement of DITA as a fundamentally effective way to approach the most common, and frequently most exasperating, challenges associated with projects mandated with modernizing how documentation is created, managed and published. Three cases are included in this paper:

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How do you design end-user assistance?

The autumn 2011 edition of the award winning ISTC journal Communicator includes an introduction to SeSAM. Download it from http://www.sesam-info.net/Communicator_2011_Autumn_SeSAM.pdf.

Designing for findability is a key if you want to be successful. Check out SeSAM if you spend a lot of effort thinking about what type of information to include in manuals and how to organize content, and if your end users are complaining about the difficulty in finding answers.

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