As the Darwin Information Typing Architecutre (DITA) gains wider acceptance as an XML standard for technical documentation, there has been increased activity towards interoperability with other standards, such as S1000D and SCORM, specialization for uses in specific industries, and adaptation for different use cases. Noteworthy is the current effort to adapt DITA for monolithic business documents other than technical documents. This adaptation opens the possibility for techdoc groups to implement DITA without requiring the paradigm shift to topic-based authoring.

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:

This IBM developerWorks article describes how to use the DITA Open Toolkit to convert DITA documents to various formats without knowing any ant.

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.

This archive provides links to DITA XML.org <soapbox> feature articles:

• Keywords: why, where and when to use them by Amber Swope
• Reuse strategies and the mechanisms that support them by France Baril
  
• Do We Really Need All that Glue? by JoAnn Hackos, PhD
  

• Specialize, but not right away by Bruce Esrig