Loving DITA is easy for me. It’s open source, it’s flexible and it helps me control my output. I’ve started using it outside of tech pubs, and it makes me happy. I think it’s the organizer in me. It might be a little fussy for fiction when you have programs like Scrivener and StoryMill that essentially help you write and contain the smallest possible morsels, as DITA does, without needing to know how to read or mess with XML, or the whole structuring thing. But for anything outside of that, it works really well.
Translating an outline into writing becomes a breeze because outline items translate directly into submaps or topics. The topics are the smallest chunks of information in a document. But, you can re-use and standardize information when you use DITA.
DITA uses a structured architecture, so it forces you to really think about it when you’re breaking the rules. Just the other day, I wrote a topic and broke the rules. It became one giant topic made up of two task topics and one concept topic. The tasks are procedures that usually include steps, and the concept topic provides general information about a subject. It felt so much better when I broke this topic into the three morsels it should have been in the first place.
I am thrilled by DITA, and I really think the world should pay attention to it.
