Comments on: DITA is not the answer

By: Bill Hagen

Bill Hagen — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:39:45 +0000

Interesting discussion. I could both agree and disagree with many of the points raised. My company has implemented single sourcing with DITA. It works–for example, I can update a set of topics and by doing so update 5 different manuals. Our “reuse magic” is mostly accomplished by ditamaps and conditional content. But after 1.5 years, I’m the only writer on our DITA project. One of the writers here made a good point–if there were 10 writers and 1,000 topics, would the writers know the content well enough to know what information to reuse? For 5 manuals, our cost was pretty high–i.e., the cost of a DITA-aware XML editor and CMS software. For us DITA has been a success, but it doesn’t solve all our problems either.

By: Does single sourcing content work? | one man writes

Does single sourcing content work? | one man writes — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:24:20 +0000

[...] of the more popular posts on this blog is titled DITA is not the answer and, whilst things are certainly moving forward, it’s a little sad that it is still [...]

By: mhiatt

mhiatt — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:25:40 +0000

I have never seen single sourcing work. Maybe a single author who knows the topics thoroughly enough to reuse, or a tightly knit group of writers synched up at the same level.

But mostly, I have been with companies that trumpeted topic based writing and reuse during the SGML Docbook phase of the early nineties. And I just left a company that uses Vasont CMS and XMetaL where all writers worldwide author on a single db. It doesn’t matter. Content reuse, even when requiring a single search and reference by a writer to another’s topic, rarely happens.

And forget about getting training or anyone other dept to reuse–even when fully localized. I just requires too much coordination. Some companies tout content reuse to justify localization–sometimes MT–but I would like to look at the books to see if it is really viable.

The only place we are going to reuse content is in web mashups using semantic markup once the content is in the cloud. How does semantics come into this? I’m still thinking that through. See Dbpedia.org for more questions.

By: Mike Taddei

Mike Taddei — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:58:25 +0000

Reading this thread has made me jealous of all the Flare users out there. I’ve wanted to get it but can’t. I make do faking single sourcing using RoboHelp X5. This approaches the statement in the above post about single sourcing onlne help to a printed manuals, which is something I do but a good deal of massaging of the printed output in Word is needed and then a PDF print utility is used to create the final draft of the manual.

By: | one man writes

| one man writes — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:53:01 +0000

[...] are in a position to quickly switch just because a new technology has come along, but and I’ve said this before (in fact I’ve said that I’ve said this before!) rollout of DITA remains harder than [...]