Wisdom from the wellspring: attending a Central Texas DITA Users’ meetup
I’ve been meaning to attend a Central Texas DITA Users’ meetup now for ages, having lurked their message boards for years. And I finally went!
“DITA users” group doesn’t begin to describe it–more like “creators-of-the-DITA-OT, there-from-the-beginning-and-still-fighting-the-good-fight” users’ group might start to cover it. It was really cool to meet some of the original IBMers and consultants who brought DITA to life, and interesting to hear some thoughts on future directions (the meetup focused on HTML 5 + DITA for ebook publishers).
I was the only newbie at the meeting, the only female, and probably the youngest–sometimes a slightly uncomfortable situation for me. But I felt welcome, and these guys reminded me of people I’ve rubbed shoulders with in familiar social circumstances (one reminded me of a musician in my band; another of a family friend, for example), which helped me boldly speak up and ask questions.
After the formal presentation, I talked DITA shop on some more esoteric questions, like push vs. pull strategies (i.e. conrefpush vs conref) and controlled vocabularies in DITA.
The controlled vocabulary discussion was particularly interesting–early in my DITA-writing days, I tried to use conrefs and/or conkeyrefs to enforce consistency of table headings, spec names, and math variables. I’ve since decided that approach was too complicated and inflexible for my successor writers to easily maintain. But thanks to the meetup, I’ve learned about some new controlled-vocab/style-enforcing technologies that I’d never realized were possible:
- Acrolinks
- AQ plugin for …(? need to check my notes on this, a google search wasn’t immediately successful)
- Schematron for Oxygen
I’m not sure to what extent these tools can be used for fine-grain style correction, beyond typical error messages about allowed datatypes inside tags–sounds like Acrolinks might work for the former, and Schematron for the latter? So, next up in my 10% time at work: research these tools.
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