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Posts Tagged ‘CSS’
DITA round up
Just doing a little data mining of the posts I’ve written about DITA in the last few years. I think that there’s a gap for DITA users who are writers or content creators and not coders. I’d like to say that DITA bloggers can bridge that gap. Join me on the DITA blog by writing your own experiences with DITA.
These posts are ordered from newest to oldest, and I wrote them to share my experiences with DITA and to chronicle some of the Central Texas DITA User Group meetings I attended.
A watched folder for publishing from DITA source files
June 15, 2007: I’ve figured out a way to automate DITA builds where you just drop a zip file of your DITA source files into a “watched folder” and PDF and CHM files are automatically built.
Usability and inline links in user assistance systems
May 19, 2007: Examining DITA’s linking and usability.
Getting Started with DITA
April 12, 2007: A brief overview for a couple of fellow Austin writers who have asked me recently how and where to get started with DITA.
Checking out the new DITA Users website
April 10, 2007: Using a coupon code (it’s BETA) I joined the new DITA Users website for free today.
A new DITA Open ToolKit release and brand new DITA newbie blog
October 04, 2006 : A couple of blog-worthy items in the DITA world
Turning information into DITA topics
September 14, 2006: What would you do to make this particular type of content into topics?
How to substitute your custom CSS when using DITA Open Toolkit transforms
September 07, 2006 : When you want to use the DITA Open Toolkit transforms but you want to use your own CSS, here’s how to substitute your CSS for HTML Help (CHM)
DITA Open ToolKit now has a User Guide
August 22, 2006: Just released last week, the DITA Open ToolKit now has its own User Guide
Using the DITA catalog for your specializations, creating a Public ID
August 16, 2006 : Thought our discovery might help you as you specialize DITA
Evaluating XML editors for DITA
August 01, 2006: Notes from the July 2006 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting
A web-form-based DITA editor
July 14, 2006: Could this be the perfect storm for a DITA wiki?
Troubleshooting tip for the DITA Open Toolkit install
June 23, 2006 : Finally figured out the fix for my DITA Open Toolkit “resource/messages.xml” not found error
Where to put your files and other setup for DITA
June 09, 2006: Working with the environment setup for DITA
Defining OPML and relating to DITA maps
May 31, 2006: I found a nice definition for OPML from whatis.com as their word of the day, and I’m starting to wonder about similarities between OPML and DITA maps
Learning more about DITA
May 18, 2006: Learning about how to get started with DITA and a trivia item for fun
Notes from the central Texas DITA user group meeting
April 21, 2006: Two speakers shared their takeaways from DITA 2006 and CMS 2006
Our DITA experience at BMC Software
March 02, 2006: Link to a case study published about BMC’s DITA experience
DITA from the trenches
February 20, 2006: Information Architect from IBM, Kristin Thomas, presented to the Central Texas DITA User’s Group meeting last week, and here are my notes.
Moving from Books to Topic-oriented Writing
January 27, 2006 : A report from JoAnn Hackos’ talk at the Central Texas DITA Users Group meeting January 2006
DITA and wiki combo
December 05, 2005: Darwin Information Typing Architecture, meet Wiki.
Darwin Information Typing Architecture - DITA (dih tuh)
November 04, 2005: Roundup of the DITA reading I’ve been diving back in to lately.
A web-form based DITA editor
Written with just HTML, Javascript, DOM, and CSS, as far as I can tell, DITA Storm is a product that enables web-form-based DITA topic authoring and display. Go check it out, their web site has a lot more content now and you can even request a copy with which to play.
As my help infrastructure buddy said, “This is so cool I think I’m going to freak out like this kid. Nintendo Sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOUR” Yep, it’s Friday, so yep, it’s a video link. Just go watch it, and get a good laugh.
I’m imagining that you could do several things with a web-based DITA editor (and topic styler). One thing would be a DITA-based wiki, where you author directly using DITA topics rather than some cryptic ASCII codes for headings and bulleted lists and so forth. End users don’t have to know DITA to enter content, either. Although I do think you’d want to also be able to copy and paste content from existing DITA topics, and I’m not sure how you’d do that (maybe there’s a “view XML code” feature in the works?). Although you can just link right to the XML topic from within the HTML page, which would be nifty for DITA topics you already had waiting in the wings.
According to the web site, “The prototype version 0.3 of DITA Storm supports following DITA elements: topic, title, shortdesc, body, section, title, note, lq, q, fn, related-links, link, linktext, desc, p, b, i, u, tt, sup, sub, task, taskbody, context, result, steps, step, cmd, stepresult.” So it is a subset of DITA so far (others are subsetting DITA but it’s not really DITA once you subset it and you can’t import DITA-compliant content later into your subsetted set. Whew.).
Another idea for using DITA Storm for end-user doc might be to build your context-sensitive help system right in with your web interface product. I suppose this idea would work only if you can lock down the content at a certain point. But the stylizing with CSS is very promising and really lets you do anything you want with the content. The stylized examples are really nice looking, such as a stylized task topic and a stylized basic topic.
And, my pet idea would also be to use DITA Storm to write blog entries. Entering blog posts in a structured language like XML would work right in with the microformatting concept. Build the next blogger.com site using DITA Storm.
This type of product in my estimation has the potential to be the next Writely, stealing from the desktop publishing user base with the beauty and simplicity of a web editor that just gets the job done. Yes, it’s another way of writing, but a nifty little tool that could help your content do some interesting cartwheels.
