Half-way DITA: Why some is better than none

If DITA seems like a good idea, but you cannot make the case for it, you can move towards structured writing and make your documentation “future-proof” by meeting the standard half-way.

At the company I work for, we tech writers created manuals in parallel, but separate to online help. Over time, this gave us a documentation set that was inconsistent in places and hard to maintain to boot. Topic-based authoring which reuses topics in print and online can fix that, of course.

First, a documentation standard

Deciding on the method is one thing, but we also wanted a consistent structure that made the documentation easier and clearer to use – and easier to maintain for us writers. That required a model that specifies which kinds of topics we want to offer, how these topics are structured inside and how they relate to one another.

As we looked towards a documentation standard, we had two options:

• We could create a content inventory of our documentation, analyse and segment it to tease some structure from that.
• Or we could rely that others had solved a similar problem before and see if we can’t use the wheel someone else had already invented.

Turns out the second option was quite feasible: The DITA 1.2 specification gives us about all the structure we need – and more. We left out the parts we didn’t need (for example, some of the more intricate metadata for printed books) and adopted a kind of DITA 1.2 “light” as our information model.

Second, the tools

Note that I haven’t mentioned any systems or tools so far! Even though it happened in parallel to the rolling out topic-based authoring as our method and DITA light as our information model, the tool selection was mainly driven by our requirements on documentation workflows, structure, deliverables, and budget.

The tool that suited us best turned out to be MadCap Flare – even though it doesn’t create or validate DITA!

Using our information model in Flare, we believe we get most of the benefits of DITA – and considerable improvement over our less-than-structured legacy content. And speaking to people at WritersUA 2011, it seems that we’re not the only one to move from less-than-structured writing to XML and something “close to DITA”.

Technically, we’ve defined the DITA elements we need as divs in the Flare stylesheets, but otherwise use the straight Flare authoring-to-publishing workflow. Flare is agnostic to whether a topic complies with DITA, is somehow structured but not complying or totally unstructured.

The benefits of DITA, half-way

To us tech writers, the largest benefit of DITA, half-way, is that we can actually do it. We could not have gotten away with DITA, the full monty, which would have required a much longer project, a much bigger migration effort and hence, uncertain ROI.

For new topics, we are committed to writing them structured, so they follow the information model. To migrate legacy topics, we’ll have to ensure they have an identifiable topic type and a suitable heading, but we can cleaning up their insides in a “soft fade”, moving them towards structure one by one. This gives us a quicker win than cleaning up literally thousands of topics before having anything to show in the new method, model or system.

So we will have been working in Flare and with our home-grown information model for a long while, before all topics actually comply with the model. But then we will have a documentation set which we can feasibly move into real structure, whether we opt for DITA or some other XML-based CMS, with or without a CMS.

This post is an elaboration of a comment thread on the “Why DITA?” guest post on Keith Soltys’ Core Dump 2.0 blog.

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