Subscribe to RSS
Posts Tagged ‘DITA’
Progress on the Conversation and Community book
The final details for my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, are coming together. Lots of news to report, so here goes.
I’m so excited to announce that Eliot Kimber has agreed to use my book for the DITA for Publishers project, taking the content from Adobe InDesign to DITA.
Tom Johnson also posted a fun interview he recorded during the STC Summit. I told Tom, I can hear myself grinning. This book is just fun to talk about.
I’m often asked, how long have you been working on it? I answer that I’ve been working on it for over a year now. It combines lots of stories from my corporate blogging days at BMC Software with my foray into the open source community with the One Laptop per Child project, SugarLabs (the education project that runs the open source software on the OLPC laptop), and most importantly, FLOSS Manuals, providing free software for free documentation. My thirty-hour work week at ASI has afforded me the time to write out my journey and my observations along the way.
What a journey it has been and I’m so pleased with how the book is turning out. This week I am furiously indexing (is there any other way to index besides furiously?) and often messing with recto and verso pages, something I haven’t done in InDesign before and boy does it show. My PageMaker days as a graduate assistant at Miami University’s Center for Chemical Education are coming in handy, no doubt about it.
I think we’ve finalized the cover design, which for me is a very exciting part of real bookmaking! I’ll see if I can share it on my blog soon.
Four fine people have agreed to do technical reviews and I know some of them are at least 100 pages in. I hope they have insights – but not too many that may cause me to think too hard. Just kidding, Alan, Will, Sarah, and Scott! 
Keep reading and keep your notes at the ready because I’m ready to make all the changes needed to keep this project rolling. This book’s time has come.
Managing Writers book includes well-earned experience stories
Richard Hamilton’s new book, Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation
It is a reference guide in my view, because you can go straight to the table of contents and pick from the list of topics. Want to get your arms around people? Refer to many chapters on Managing People. Need to know insider information on projects before it spirals out of control? Stop the spin machine and go to the pages about Managing Projects. Wondering if the latest alphabet-based tossed salad of acronyms will actually solve your user’s information problems? Hightail it to the Managing Technology chapters. Each of his chapters offers the depth and detail you’d need when faced with a situation you hadn’t seen before. For example, if you’re new to Localization, the information offered will help you ask the right questions and help you get started while avoiding headaches and “time sinks.”
As I read through this book, I felt like I was having a nice long lunch with one of my favorite managers. It’s sprinkled with stories and phrases like “gold-plated Cadillac.” I enjoyed reading about his path to technical publications. It seems many people are eager to leave tech pubs once they start in it. Richard didn’t know much about tech pubs, and wondered if he was leaving the world of technology, but accepted a position anyway. He was willing to learn and stay with it. And stay with it he did, for many years beyond the first two he promised to the hiring manager.
Whether you’re already managing a handful of writers or just starting out, or if you’re hoping to move towards management in technical publications, I think you’ll find this book helpful. Even an experienced tech pubs manager will enjoy hearing another’s perspective and will find many familiar themes that match their own companies and product documentation.
Scott Abel had three copies of the book that he was giving away on Twitter last week – get one before they’re gone, or buy your own copy to read and then keep on your shelf. Like I said myself on Twitter when I first read the book, thank you Richard, for no cat herding references.
What is Anne Gentle up to?
I finally feel some energy returning after my eye injury about a month ago, although my right eye remains dilated which still means that side is a bit out-of-focus and I don’t like driving at night. I feel like I need to give a status update or some such. So here goes.
Winter Camp
With luck my eye should be just fine in time for a big event coming up: Winter Camp 09 the first week of March. I’ll be representing and working for FLOSS Manuals at this event, held in Amsterdam. From the description, it will be an amazing week:
Network Cultures Winter Camp will be a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done. It will be a four-day program of work spaces and plenary presentations, in which a dozen networks (each of which has 5-15 people) can work on their specific current topics.
The format was inspired by a cardboard box art installation that activates a temporary warehouse of contemporary knowledge from what I can gather from a translation of the page, Re-fitting ideas. Come on, that’s incredible. I am so thrilled to be a part of it. And I know it’s going to be a week of hard work.
Preschool website completed, using Wordpress 2.7
We’ve also finished the preschool website I mentioned in my interview with Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting. We used WordPress hosted at Midas Networks. I recorded some screencasts with Jing to show other parent volunteers how to edit content and work with images. All the photos on the site were taken by parents so it’s quite the “do-it-yourself” website. I am hoping that Wordpress 2.7 will be easy enough for even those in our volunteer and staff group who are not technically savvy but still give us the growth towards more content creators that we have in our goals for the site.
FLOSS Manuals and OLPC
We’ve sold over 200 copies of the OLPC Laptop Users Guide on Lulu.com, and Adam Hyde gave a copy of one of FLOSS Manuals’ books to Bob Young, the CEO of Lulu, while they were at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. Impressive. I still plan to make the Sugar Users Guide better. Adam Hyde and I are working on a book about how to run a Book Sprint in FLOSS Manuals, naturally, and we would welcome additional contributors.
DITA and Web 2.0
I’ve been approached to help put a public face on standards for DITA and Web 2.0 projects such as DITA for wikis (an example is Lisa Dyer’s DITA2Wiki project on SourceForge) and DITA for blogs (another example is DITA to Wordpress or DITA and microformats).
STC Intercom Editorial Advisory Panel
I’ve been pretty impressed with the STC Intercom issues in 2009 so far, but I wrote one of the articles so perhaps my judgement would be playing favorites. I would like to gather feedback from STC members and non-members who read the articles – how’s the content grabbing you this year?
Author-it 5.2
It looks as though 5.2 is the version of Author-it that will allow us to upgrade from 4.5. Our content just wouldn’t publish adequately (Word or HTML) on 5.0 or 5.1, but now that 5.2 is released, fingers crossed, we’ll be moving to 5.2 soon. I should write a blog post about some of our testing on our 20,000+ object database. I’m getting used to the Ribbon Bar as I continue to work in Word 2007, and Author-it’s 5.x interface feels a lot like Word 2007.
Writing a book, do tell me what you want to know
Last but certainly not least, I’m working with a professional editor to try to finalize my book about documentation as conversation that examines the power of social media for writing projects. It walks through the myriad of possibilities of different types of social media tools and analyzes how writers and communities are using these tools for technical documentation. Look for it this spring!
InfoSlicer is released to the world
Let the remixing begin. I just got word today that the Infoslicer project has been checked into the Sugar code repository at http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/infoslicer, and released under the GPLv2 license. Can I get a whoohoo? Oh yeah!
Infoslicer is a Sugar Activity that enables students and instructors around the world to assemble Wikipedia articles into new information packages. Under the covers one of the technologies that makes this possible is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). I first wrote about the InfoSlicer last fall, in Wikislicing project gets real – introducing InfoSlicer as a Sugar Activity with a picture of students using scissors to re-assemble Wikipedia articles.
If you want to download the Activity to your XO or another computer with Sugar installed (here’s how) to try it out yourself, go to http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer and install the Activity (here’s how).
I have downloaded it to my XO in anticipation of showing it off at the next XO Austin Users Group meeting and the install was straightforward. I’ll get it on a USB stick to share at the meeting (2/16 at Central Market on N. Lamar in Austin at 6:30). Here’s a screenshot – and be sure to check out the YouTube video!
Laura Cowen notes that the xo package that you download doesn’t contain any sample articles from Wikipedia (which ideally it would to help you get up and running more quickly using the tutorial). You can use InfoSlicer without these sample articles (you download Wikipedia articles from within InfoSlicer anyway). If anyone is able to re-compile the xo package with sample articles in it, Laura can provide instructions on where to put the sample articles in the package so that InfoSlicer automatically picks them up when it starts. Who wants to create the wikislice seen ’round the world?
Structured Wikis and Software Engineering – Documentation Throughout the Process
Lisa Dyer and I have co-authored another paper about structured wikis, using DITA as the structure for the wiki. The paper contains specific ideas about using wikis both internally and externally for software engineering processes and software documentation.
Our assertion is this: While either waterfall development methods or Agile development methods could benefit from the collaboration a wiki offers, we believe that DITA typing combined with the wiki collaboration offers even greater benefits than DITA alone or a wiki as a standalone authoring environment.
We think this one is worthy of a price tag, so it’s available for sale here at Just Write Click. You don’t need a PayPal account to purchase if you click-through the links that don’t require you to login to PayPal, you just need a credit card. Once you purchase it, you’ll go to a page with a download link to the PDF file. We’ve discontinued the selling of this paper and thanks to those of you who purchased it, read it, and took off with the ideas!
You can now download the paper originally submitted to the Wikis 4 Software Engineering at WikiSym 2008.
We’ve revised it based on feedback from three reviewers who had excellent commentary and were not technical writers, so it should contain useful information for technical writers, developers, software engineers, business analysts, project managers, and quality assurance engineers.
Notes from CenTX DITA Users Group – panel on the DITA Maturity Model
For our October meeting, we simply asked several Austin-based techpubs teams to review the DITA Maturity Model and to think ahead of time about how you would position your own DITA efforts:
Where do you think your team is in the adoption ladder?
Where do you want to be?
The DITA Maturity Model: A Stepwise Approach to Enterprise Content
-
Level 1: Topics
-
Level 2: Scalable Reuse
-
Level 3: Specialization and Customization
-
Level 4: Automation and Integration
-
Level 5: Semantics-on Demand
-
Level 6: Universal Semantic Ecosystem
The links to the paper are available either as PDF or HTML:
- http://na.justsystems.com/files/Whitepaper-DITA_MM.pdf
- http://dita.xml.org/wiki/introduction-to-the-maturity-model
Here are my notes from the session – feel free to ask questions in the comments! Such a useful session – afterwards I thought “This session is exactly what user groups are made for.”
Lisa Dyer – Lombardi
2005 adoption
1.0 DITA spec
Level 4-5 currently
Wiki system and wiki output
Goal – dynamic personalization
Personalized content view on the wiki – what version, what release name
the users can use custom RSS feeds to “listen” to changes on that content.
Sets a sortID for each wiki page based on ordering of the DITA map which allows for TOC ordering on the wiki page.
Q: Audience for the wiki? A: Behind the firewall development wiki, also support login ID only wiki, external wiki has “warrantied” content plus another space for “community-generated” content.
When migrating, they put everything into Concept DTD, then put it into Perforce (didn’t get “where used” until went to CMS).
But CMS might slow you down. Analysis into paralasys – metadata schemes, “if we spend all this money we need to do it right the first time” pressure.
Mike Austin – Freescale
3 reps – 3 different business groups
started DITA process late 2004
Spread out across first 3 levels
Want structural mechanisms to make it easy to do right, but difficult to do wrong (don’t want artifacts left behind that clutter up views).
There are good political reasons for starting with a CMS if other teams are using it and want tools for finding the content they want.
Q: Does size of team make a difference or location?
A: Mixed… may depend on culture too. But definitely needed help on DITA maps, but Subversion doesn’t lock files it just tries to reconcile differences. Also, how well do you know target deliverables?
Colleen Reilly – Borland
Writer, has been there a year
March 2008, started implementing DITA
All of level 2 – but she doesn’t do level 3, but does do parts of level 4
Three products
Converted a user’s guide – - OEM to BMC Software – started out as FrameMaker files that went to RoboHelp, and another set of Framemaker
files and RH files for BMC templates. Plus translated to German and Japanese. BMC OEMed product is not quite the same as the Borland delivery – so variables helped immensely. Plus conditional text for a certain functionality that was only available in the Borland version. From four sources, back down to single source.
Structure of the document was more challenging.
Reuse – one file with all conrefs, all product names in that file
one file for the whole deliverable – common notes, common commands, plus even four steps at a time, commented heavily to let other writers know where to find content, plus other writers can find it if needed.
Several DITA maps – book DITA map, plus maps for each chapter.
Getting Started guide is 60 topics
API reference guide is 2117 topics
She is able to re-use content.
Q: How do you make sure all your topics are in the DITA map? A: She uses file datestamps to verify – and always adds new topics to the DITA map right away. Noreen looks for a red X in the CMS, but found that even if it’s used in the reltable it is seen as “used” in the CMS.
Sally Derrick - Borland
Director of info dev services (tools group)
2.5, smatterings in level 4
Started in April 2007 – with a homegrown XML system
Converted
First specialization – glossary
Also since translate to Japanese, enabled See and See Also
Enabled cross-project linking for Eclipse help
2600 topics, 2100 in one document
Installation guides that are DITA – output to PDF only
Corporate glossary created in DITA
CMS is Subversion, still young at all this since they don’t yet have a lot of cross-product content re-use, but as products become more integrated, will have more re-use.
Q: Did you have “where used” in Subversion? A: Biggest status marker they use is “ready to translate” – Subversion attribute. Manually set everything to “no” then set it back to “yes” after its ready to translate.
Implemented context ids for context-sensitive help.
Sally has a t-shirt that says “I don’t nag, I’m a motivational speaker.”
Each team has a lead writer, 3 leads help make decisions.
Sally also manages translation managers – 3 vendors from around the world. XML translations are much better for translation memory, etc. Trados from SDL is one manager’s fav tool, other managers use different tools. Any good translation vendor is going to use translation memory – can reuse content that’s already translated. Author assistant tools may find reuseable paragraphs.
Noreen McMahan- Freescale
Works for Bob Beims – core infrastructure system person at Freescale and trainer for DITA
Agile approach – to scheduling projects
Their original goal was Level 1 by July 1 and they made it.
Leads came up with goals and requirements for achieving Level 1
Proceeded in 2-week sprints
Specializing conditional processing, feature based, structural domain specializations.
XML editor customization, Serna plugin lets it talk to Dakota CMS
One map type to get different output
Check errata content specializations
Plus semiconductor information for register specification for XML formats during design phase.
Also aligning metadata strategy with design source systems and repositories.
Wondering how the CMS could integrate with the web?
Also specializations for semantic tagging motivation.
Domain specializations, metadata strategy
Versioning, CMS another speciality
Integrating Open Toolkit with a widget that now works smoothly
She’s the internal trainer – uses the system and XML editor – giving feature requests.
Level 3 by Christmas
Tom Gihack- Freescale
Last business group to come to the DITA party
Consuming level 3 products from other groups – about to make bigger progress.
Half DITA, half FrameMaker implementation
Q: When you have a preponderance of information legacy vs. when you have DITA – which level can you achieve? Seems like you can get all the levels without DITA?
A: Levels of the model that make it easier to acheive with DITA – typical use case for Freescale – reference manuals that contain 12-15 chpaters specific to that product only, but 20-80 chapters that comes from all over different design centers. Struggling with the issue of combined legacy output – how can you recombine with a new toolset that uses both? Pipeline that starts with FrameMaker and then combines
p. 15 of white paper talks to the point that all of this is possible without DITA – what DITA offers is … refer to paper
Sally says “Content is driving us through the maturity levels.”
Get as much converted as possible, but only specialize when you run into a need for it.
Role-based presentation of the UI – then wouldn’t role-based help be great to go with the U
Can’t see them going further along maturity model ladder until all the content is converted.
For Lisa two the drivers – findability, implementing enterprise level content strategy (bringing other groups on board). Training group is bailing on instructor-led training, but may be led back to that since on-demand and web-based isn’t getting them the results they want. Really struggling. 80% of the coursework was in the user-doc already.
Siemens PLM at Best Practices conference.
150 information development groups at IBM – delivering right content, right person, right time via the right the channel
Lisa’s – Three years in, have more time to write.
Symantec – 5 years in to topic authoring, more time to write and bring customer feedback into the doc, analyze search requests
DITA Meets Wiki – Output DITA to Wikitext
A few years ago I wrote a blog entry on talk.bmc.com about combining DITA’s structured authoring principles with wiki’s collaborative, quick authoring style. The subtitle is “Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Meet Wiki” and I think that’s still appropriate. For quite some time, it was in the top ten on Google when searching for “DITA wiki” and today it’s a respectable 3rd or 4th hit.
I’m pleased to report on my blog once again about the possibilities of DITA and wiki – by reporting that there’s an open source method for converting DITA source files to wikitext output and even populating the wiki itself when using Confluence wiki. Lisa Dyer of Lombardi Software has been using this technique for about four years now in production, and she has generously given back to the community by starting the DITA2Wiki open source project on SourceForge.
Lisa has two blog entries describing both the initial release and this week’s update release:
Currently, it builds to Confluence Wiki, but its framework lets you extend it further to more wiki engines. I want to get a MediaWiki conversion going next, and I have joined the project in order to contribute. It would be great to have others join in the project.
I downloaded the DITA2wiki files, downloaded and installed a 30-day trial of Confluence wiki, and had working output with only a few troubleshooting incidents (I kept forgetting to change the path slashes from / to \ on Windows for the ant build properties file!) All the instructions for getting it up and running are on the SourceForge.net wiki pages for the project. I’ll sheepishly admit these are the pre-requisites I needed before I got it to work, in addition to the Troubleshooting that Lisa already provides:
- Ensure you have a Confluence wiki running on the computer you’re using DITA2Wiki to build the output.
- Ensure the URL and password for the wiki is correct.
- Ensure the paths in the guide.properties file are correct. The two paths I had to change were the location of the DITA source files and the location of the DITA DTDs from the DITA Open ToolKit.
- Each time you modify a path in the .properties file for a Windows environment, remember that the slashes are opposite direction from a copy and paste of the directory structure give you on Windows.
If you’re interested in using structured wikis and DITA especially in a software engineering project, you may want to read it on the Wikis 4 Software Engineering site. In it we describe how development processes, especially those using Agile development practices, can be streamlined and efficient when a highly collaborative and motivated staff has the right combination of wiki collaboration tools and training with structure added to the design and test documents shared on an internal wiki. The case study at the end shows how wiks and DITA end-user documentation work to give end-users the top layer of documentation started way back in the design process.
Wikislicing project gets real – introducing InfoSlicer as a Sugar Activity
Scissor-style information slicing
A photo of old school remixing – printing out Wikipedia articles and recombining them.
This was a fun learning exercise as part of an IBM Extreme Blue student project creating a Sugar Activity called InfoSlicer.
Instead of using scissors, you can now slice information by downloading Wikipedia articles, editing and remixing them, and reading them online. also uploading edits to Wikipedia (Edited: woops, that was part of our use case and it should work in the future because it was designed with that extension in mind).
Under the covers it is using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, also known as DITA (dih-tuh), a standard set of DTDs (or schemas) that allow sharing of open source transformations and an open toolkit implementation. See dita-ot.sourceforge.net for more information.
Watch a demo of the InfoSlicer Activity in action here:
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0UDRi37MWM
This Activity was part of the Wikislice Project. We met our goal of creating custom curriculum materials from Wikipedia for OLPC but we still have work we want to do to help teachers use it.
I can hear all the librarians and teachers of the world saying together – cool!
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) reading list
Here’s a reading list for DITA materials when you’re just getting started. I’ve been fielding some questions via email and IM about DITA lately, and pulled this blog post out of my drafts. I hope it’s helpful.
Learning more about DITA
http://justwriteclick.com/2006/05/18/learning-more-about-dita/
Getting started with DITA
http://justwriteclick.com/2007/04/12/getting-started-with-dita/
Structured writing, structured documentation
http://www.mbwest.com/Rants-and-raves.htm
BMC Case Study featured in The Rockley Report:
http://www.rockley.com/TheRockleyReport/V2I1/Feature%20Article.htm
Is DITA Going to Tip? By JoAnn Hackos in the CIDM newsletter
http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200512/feature.htm
Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing
Architecture book by Jennifer Linton and Kylene Bruski.
Planning for DITA Success: How to Set Up the Right Team and the Right
Strategy, Part I, by Steve Manning of The Rockley Group and Su-Laine
Yeo of Blast Radius
http://www.rockley.com/articles/WhitePaper_DITA_Success_Dec05.pdf
Planning for DITA Success: How to Deploy DITA, Step-By-Step, Part II,
by Steve Manning of The Rockley Group and Su-Laine Yeo and Paul
Prescod of XMetaL
http://www.rockley.com/articles/WhitePaper_DITA_Deploying_Apr061.pdf
10 DITA Lessons Learned From Tech Writers in the Trenches
http://www.thecontentwrangler.com/article/10_dita_lessons_learned/
Updated to add:
ISTC Communicator articles about DITA (2005-2007)
http://dita.xml.org/resource/istc-communicator-articles-about-dita-2005-2007
Notes from April 2008 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting
Better late than never, I suppose. I’ve had these notes on my hard drive and want to post them to the cloud of my blog.
John Hunt, DITA Architect in the Lotus Information Development Center at IBM and DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization SC chair, presented Using DITA Content for Learning Content Development at the April 2008 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting. He gave an overview of work being done on the new Learning and Training Content specialization that will be part of OASIS DITA 1.2 release. (Updated to add: see DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization SC for additional information and download links for the Open Toolkit Plug-in that contains the approved specialization.) He then followed up with a live demonstration of creating, assembling, and delivering topic-based learning and training content, delivered both as a SCORM-compliant package and as simple XHTML.
In the room we had about 20 Austin attendees and on the phone, a handful more in Ann Arbor, with John Hunt, our presenter, presenting from Massachusetts. He has worked with DITA for 9-10 years, but interestingly, has met Don Day in person only once.
Learning specialization will become a DITA standard in next OASIS release.
John led with a very recent newspaper article, about re-creating the Jefferson Library – “Re-created Library Speaks Volumes About Jefferson” Amy Orndorff, Washington Post, Apr 11, 2008 (John’s talk was on the 16th!) The library was given to the Library of Congress for $24,000 in 1815. Jefferson had created his own taxonomy – memory, reason, or imagination. Automatically, John wondered if you could parallels to reference, concept, or task. Ah ha!
Fascinating – Jefferson did mashups of books by tearing them apart, even different language books, and then would bind them into new books – reassembly of content 200 years ahead of his time.
Industry context – trends – smaller, faster, leaner for creating and delivering training content.
Content as reusable learning object helps… RLOs (Reusable Learning Objects) were developed at Cisco in the 1990s, similar to legos as building blocks – different structures with the same set of Legos.
LCMS (learning content management system) came into being.
Training can move from a “craft” approach to a DITA content approach, standard.
Craft = every deliverable unique, every context one-of-a-kind
Craft = presentation oriented, labor intensive
DITA = content and deliverables have consistent structures and patterns, so available for reuse and repurposing
DITA = collaboration and reuse becomes the norm
IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata) is a standard for the learning metadata domain. See ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/20020612-Final-LOM-Draft.html
Build maps + specialized processing = generated learning deliverables such as tutorials, courseware and e-learning, ILTs, SCORMs=mandated for training delivered to the U.S. Govt. (Dept. of Defense), Textbooks. In case you’re wondering, SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model – SCORM is a set of specifications created by the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative (ADL). The ADL website has that SCORM runtime freely available, see www.adlnet.gov/downloads/.
Learning objects contain:
- Instructional objects: overview, content, summary, assessment
- Informational objects: concept, task, reference, also known as Facts, Concepts, Procedures, Principles
5 new DITA specializations as learning types – learningPlan, learningOvereview, learningContent, learningSummary, learningAssessment
Midnight at the OASIS – 32 members on the sub-committee, working drafts, Lang. Spec available for inclusion in DITA 1.2 (Nov 13, 2007)
Specializations of 5 topic types.
Also, three domains are available:
- Learning interactions domains – open question, true/false, single select, multiple select, matching, sequencing, hotspot.
- Learning map domain – learning objects and groups, makes learning content available for use in any DITA map
- Learning metadata domain – makes learning metadata available for use in learning topics and maps.
What does DITA bring to learning content?
Consistency all around (content, processing, delivery)
Can grow as DITA grows – add a Flash object
DITA vision – a platform for collaboration
DITA specialized tags contain “lc” for learning content – lcAudience, lcObjectives, lcDuration, lcPrereqs, lcChallenge (instructions follow that address that challenge), and so on.
Manifest file informs the navigation that is then imported inside the zip file into a sample run-time environment – Advanced Distributed Learning. Has Suspend and Quit buttons, as well as Previous and Continue buttons. Assessment section has questions, true and false with javascript that lets you find out if your response is correct or not.
He showed an embedded Youtube video using the DITA object tag within the Summary object. See Double bonus slide for embed code.
Q: Are you re-inventing the wheel with DITA since scorm and ilm are already standards.
A: Scorm is a packaging and delivery standard. Scorm is silent with regard to content.
Eliot Kimber, Really [ ] Solutions, uses the DITA solution for practice test books for each states – remapped element names to new element names and he gets all the SCORM online assessments pretty much for free because he’s using DITA. Nice.
Anne Gentle is the author of 
