| title | author | ID |
|---|---|---|
Introducing Lightweight DITA |
Larry Kollar |
intro |
This chapter explains the rationale behind Lightweight DITA (LwDITA). If you prefer to jump right in, proceed to Getting Started.
When you're up to your *** in alligators, it's hard to remember the initial objective was to drain the swamp.
Structured, topic-based authoring has many benefits. But it often comes with complexity and cost that put it beyond the reach of many documentation departments.
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is the current gold standard for structured documentation. Its flexible "specialization" mechanism gives it the ability to adapt to the needs of most documentation groups. Still, DITA has a reputation—at least partially earned—for being overly complex and expensive to implement. Even the DITA Technical Committee (TC) admits the full-DITA standard has become highly complex:
Conference presentations and practitioners' blogs occasionally describe DITA as an intimidating grammar with too many document and element types. In the base edition, DITA 1.3 has three document types and 189 element types. In contrast, LwDITA has two document types and 48 element types. 39 of the element types are defined in DITA 1.3, and the other 9 are multimedia element types that are part of a forthcoming domain intended for use with DITA 1.3.
Lightweight DITA: An Introduction Version 1.0. Edited by Carlos Evia, Kristen James Eberlein, and Alan Houser. 10 April 2018. OASIS Committee Note 01.
Fortunately, DITA—and XML in general—is not an absolute requirement for structured, topic-based authoring. Indeed, the Bell System Practices were topic-based and predate computers, let alone XML.