medium weight dita
TRANSCRIPT
Medium Weight DITA
Information type semantics with far fewer tags
Bob ThomasTagsmiths, LLCtagsmiths.com+1 720 201 8260
Who am I?• Active contributor to the OASIS DITA Technical
Committee• Career technical writer from 1980 through 1995• Key developer in Lucent Technologies Information
Mapping® SGML DTD project• Independent consultant and owner of
Tagsmiths, LLC• Bachelors degree in Computer Science and
Mathematics
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What’s this about?• The DITA Technical Content DTDs offer authors a
daunting number of element choices• DITA defines configuration and constraint
techniques to limit the number of elements for specific implementations
• These techniques require someone who is skilled with DTD syntax
• This talk presents a DTD framework that simplifies this process
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Tagsmiths Authoring DTD framework
• A single configuration file turns vocabulary domains on or off for all technical content DTDs
• A predefined set of constraints can be individually activated from the same configuration file
• No DTD syntax knowledge is required to change the settings in the configuration file
• Distributed as a DITA Open Toolkit plugin (compatible with dita-ot 2.2.1 or later)
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Enough talk! Let’s see it.• A live demonstration showing the configuration in
action• The Tagsmiths Authoring framework is freely
available at GitHub (https://github.com/robertnthomas/Tagsmiths-Authoring)
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Why do this?• Easier learning for authors new to DITA• Faster element selection for authors• Clearer semantics emerge when irrelevant choices
drop out• Greater consistency in element selection• Fewer choices mean fewer mistakes• Fewer XML contexts mean simpler stylesheets
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Why not use Lightweight DITA instead?
• Maybe you should, especially if you have people writing who neither care about nor understand information types
• Remember, the benefits of writing technical content with information types are considerable
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Information type benefits• Topics have tighter scope• Content is easier to reuse• Consistent structure• Readers find information faster• Less content does the same amount of work• Localization costs go down• Reader satisfaction goes up
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Under the hood
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• OASIS reference DTDs have been refactored to support centralized configuration
• Domains and constraints included or excluded through parameters
• Parameters control marked sections in the DTD shells and modules
Current authoring framework limitations
• No dita-ot extension points are available• Requires DTD expertise to:
o Incorporate new specializationso Modify or add constraints
• Limited to the Technical Content DTDs• For now, conref from Authoring to OOTB DITA topics
will not work
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Will it play nice with others?
• Yes! The following points explain why.• All files that parse against the authoring DTDs will
parse against their counterparts in the OASIS reference DTDs
• Unique public identifiers used with these DTDs allow publications to mix and match topics authored in the looser reference DTDs
• Mix and match means that you can simply start using the authoring versions for new topics without having to convert existing topics
• Conref from Authoring to OOTB DITA will not work
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Conclusion• Authoring DTDs are best practice in any structured
writing implementations, DITA or otherwise• Preserving semantics that are important to your
organization, while eliminating those that are not, yields:o Faster writingo Better taggingo Fewer edge cases for stylesheets
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Questions?
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Resources• Tagsmiths Authoring Framework on GitHub:
https://github.com/robertnthomas/Tagsmiths-Authoring• Recorded demo of the Tagsmiths Authoring Framework:
https://vimeo.com/157788804
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Bob ThomasTagsmiths, [email protected]