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.