DITA is a sophisticated XML-based application architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information. While enthusiastically adopted in the TechDoc world, DITA is less understood among traditional publishing organizations. What all types of publishers can agree on is that content must be structurally tagged to address the new speed of publishing—delivering content anywhere, anytime, on any device. DITA makes XML more accessible to enterprises, large and small, that have compelling business reasons to use XML but for whom the traditional (pre-DITA) cost was often prohibitive, or at least daunting. In a time when economic pressures are simultaneously requiring publishers to innovate and squeezing the budgets used to deploy that innovation, DITA, simply in terms of its economy, is a powerful tool that publishers can apply, even for what may seem to be simple problems.
In this presentation (delivered remotely, via the web), DITA specialist Eliot Kimber from Really Strategies, Inc., introduces DITA for publishers, the basic publishing-specific DITA components that are completely generic, and how DITA can be the toolset that launches publishers into the XML world. He’ll illustrate that at its core, DITA is relatively simple and can be easily applied to simple XML applications that need to represent things like books and magazine articles. DITA’s unique extensibility architecture makes it a better business value than any comparable XML alternative. Eliot’s enthusiasm, combined with his straight-forward approach to DITA, will have you starting to take DITA seriously.
