I was looking at DITA Storm, the web-based DITA editor, for a side project today and came across a link touting “comprehensive project-level DITA authoring and publishing experience.” I’m pretty excited about this discovery — it’s ditausers.org, a place where I can try out the web-based DITA editor on a hosted web server. And, it’s free membership right now with reasonable rates later. The coupon code is BETA, just go through the checkout system and use Coupon as your method of payment. Nifty!
As for my dabblings with DITA Storm itself, I couldn’t convince my home system administrator (my husband) to help me install it on our webserver at home. Our Apache installation would have to be upgraded (one method of implementing DITA Storm needs an Apache Web Server extension that includes PHP with XSL such as Sablotron) and I don’t blame him for turning down that work request. I didn’t want to do the upgrade myself either. DITA Users has the right idea of installing the web server for you if you just want to author and publish DITA with little backend work yourself.
DITA Storm always gets me thinking about what’s next for web-browser editors and DITA. I wonder if a concept of a DITA audit is ready for prime time? You know how you can upload and validate your HTML documents to test forW3C Recommendations compliance, or 508 accessibility problems, such as the W3C HTML Validation Service and others like it (see this list). I think that some day writers might want to upload their DITA marked up documents to test for best practices in tagging for their topics, especially for task. I believe that IBM has CSS files that automatically check on how well “typed” certain content is after going through their migration tool. For example, are ordered lists in a generic topic and should be re-written as tasks with <step><cmd> elements? Is a validation step the next thing for making sure you’re using DITA to its fullest potential?
I plan to put the feed for the DITA Users Progress blog in my feed reader list. Thanks for the free beta membership, guys!