1. What They Won't Tell You
About DITA
Alan Houser
Principal Consultant and Trainer
Tel: 412-363-3481
arh@groupwellesley.com
Group Wellesley, Inc. www.groupwellesley.com

2. About Me
• Consultant and Trainer in Publishing Tools and Technologies
• Member OASIS DITA Technical Committee
• Society for Technical Communication, Liaison to the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C)
• Fellow, Society for Technical Communication
• Conference Manager,
Society for Technical Communication Summit,
Sacramento, CA, May 15-18 2011
• Candidate for Vice President, Society for Technical
Communication, 2011-2012

3. Overview
• Key differences between open-source and common off-the-shelf
(COTS) software solutions in cost, maintainability, and typical
feature set
• Key differences between standards-based and proprietary solutions
• Surprising and under-publicized pain points when working with DITA
• Issues to be aware of when considering DITA or other XML-based
publishing solutions
• Indicators for and against DITA or other XML-based publishing
solutions

4. But Open-Source is Free!
• Purchase may be free, but…
• When configuration, customization, and support costs
are considered, total cost of deployment tends to be
similar to COTS solutions.

5. Standards-Based vs.
Proprietary Solutions
Standards-Based Proprietary
• Slow • Fast
• Compromised • Optimized
• Consensus-driven • Market-driven

6. What about DITA?
• You may be solving problems that you didn’t know were
problems.
• Some things that were once easy will become hard.
Some will become very hard.
• If your organization shares publishing requirements with
IBM, you’re probably in luck. If not, good luck.

7. Important DITA Features?
• The DITA Prime Directive: Universal source file
interoperability. Specialization/generalization model.
• Explicit support for variables? Not yet. Maybe DITA 1.3.
• Output formats from the DITA Open Toolkit:
Eclipse Help? Check. Context-sensitive HTML Help or
WebHelp? No.

8. DITA: Ease of Deployment and
Maintenance
“Armies”
Well-known technical communication conference presenter and thought
leader, when asked about the resources his company devotes to
publishing his DITA content.

9. DITA: The Hard Stuff
• Graphics with annotations
• Equations
• Customizing output (especially PDF, which is Really
Hard)
• Specialization (harder than you might be led to believe)
• Topic management, especially without a CMS
• Legacy content migration

10. PDF Publishing:
The Achilles Heel of DITA?
“We have invested megabucks in a CMS and
collaborative writing and DITA, we're on the
cutting edge and making it happen - and our
PDFs look like sh*t!”
Employee of DITA adopting organization

11. The Problem with DITA and PDF
Publishing to PDF is generally through a two-step process:
• XSLT (transformation) > XSL-FO (formatting)
XSL-FO: “A very powerful language for creating ugly
pages.”
• XSL-FO is highly complex, unforgiving
• Any formatting changes will require programming skills
• Processing and presentation are inextricably combined
• No opportunity for manual formatting
intervention

12. DITA Tools:
Features and Capabilities
“Gee, this tool has a lot more features than
<our former XML authoring tool>.”
Student learning popular help authoring tool
after working in an XML environment
• Tools tend to provide basic features for authoring
• Project management features tend to be punted to the
CMS

13. Migrating to DITA
“Migration will cost a fortune. If your
information is consistent and implicitly
structured, it will cost a small fortune.”
Well-known publishing consultant
• Migrating legacy content to DITA is a difficult, resource-
intensive (e.g., time and/or $$$) problem. There are no
easy solutions.

14. But XML is the Future, Correct?
• Not on the Web
• W3C has ceased XHTML activities
• Efforts of splinter group (WHATWG) has become
HTML5. “Pave the cowpaths” trumps “pedantic
correctness.”
• Draconian error handling, complexity, remain major
issues for XML

15. Where Does DITA Work?
• Reuse. Real Reuse. Topics appearing in multiple
contexts. Not “copyright statement” reuse.
• Translation, where benefits of automated publishing
outweigh development costs and lack of control. Usually
this means many languages.
• Small organizations, that need a low-barrier entry to
single-source, multi-channel publishing, who can easily
adapt to DITA limitations and don’t have large bodies of
legacy content.

16. DITA: More that they won’t tell you
• Many COTS tools support content reuse (topic, chunk,
and phrase-level), automated and semi-automated
publishing, multi-channel publishing, content filtering.
• COTS-based workflows can be optimized for translation
efficiency. There’s little “magic” about XML for
translation, except automated publishing.
• Desktop publishing, like all technologies, can present
inefficiencies. But these are often exaggerated.

17. What’s Next for DITA?
• Will vendors support DITA 1.2?
• Will adopters use DITA 1.2?
• Do we need a WHATWG-style alternative to DITA?

18. Contact Us!
We hope you enjoyed this presentation. Please feel free to
contact us:
Alan Houser
arh@groupwellesley.com
Group Wellesley, Inc.
933 Wellesley Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
USA
412-363-3481
www.groupwellesley.com