The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has emerged as a standard topic-oriented document architecture. DITA holds many advantages over other source information, including better reuse, easily changed presentation styles, and easy single sourcing.
The DITA architecture is focused on topics -- relatively small, independent pieces of information that can fit in a browser window with minimal scrolling. Breaking the information down into these units brings many advantages:
- You can quickly rearrange your topics based on a target audience; you do not need to worry about rewriting connecting text to make the topics flow.
- You can easily share your topics with others. If your product shares some tasks with those in another product, you can grab the topics from that other product simply by referencing them, rather than rewriting or making copies. This saves you time in authoring, makes information more consistent between products, and saves you money on translation.
- DITA stores content, not styles. If you need to change your web presentation for a particular region or audience, you can just switch your stylesheet. If you actually need to change the output for one region (such as using a different banner image for bi-directional languages), the transform pipeline design makes it easy for you to tweak the output.
- Most importantly, DITA lets you create specialized information. This is a feature that allows you to create more specific DTDs for your information, while still using all of the same processes as you do with your original information -- from editing, to translation, to publication. This is described in greater detail below.
Once you have your information stored in DITA, it is a simple matter to translate; details of the translation process are given below. After translation, it is equally easy to publish. Tools are already available to convert DITA topics into common formats like XHTML, HTML Help, and PDF. These output transforms work for a wide variety of languages; most new languages can be added by updating the translations for default strings.
Robert D. Anderson
Authoring Tools Development
IBM Corporation |
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