ClickHelp as a DITA Alternative
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DITA is short for The Darwin Information Typing Architecture. It comprises the principles of specialization and inheritance that are much like the Darwinian theory. “Information typing” means the classification of information into topics, not “typing” as in keyboarding 🙂
“Architecture” is a hierarchy of elements or adaptable set of structures. It provides vertical headroom (new applications) and lateral extension (specialization into new types) for information.
“DITA is an XML standard for authoring, generating, and providing technical information.”
The idea of creating such a data model belongs to IBM, which needed more effective reuse of content in products’ documentation. So the technical publications department presented DITA in 2001 for internal use. In 2004 DITA was donated to the OASIS standards organization. The latest version was released in 2016, it’s called DITA V1.3 Errata 01.
DITA consists of a set of design principles that help to create and manage content separately from formatting. If you want to understand how it works, you must understand how DITA uses topics, maps, and output formats. You create your content in DITA topics, apply DITA maps to define which topics move into which deliverables, then handle those maps to DITA output formats to produce your final deliverables.
A topic is the basic content unit of DITA. It is understood separately and used in different contexts. A topic should be brief to distinguish a single subject or answer a single question; at the same time, it must make sense and be written as an independent item. It has a fixed structure, which helps topics be consistent even when written by different authors. DITA 1.0 and 1.1 provides three basic topic types:
DITA 1.2 includes additional topic types (specialized for learning plans, overviews, summaries, and assessments).
Confused already? Yes, it’s not so simple. And DITA introduces a lot of items that should be well-understood for the efficient application of this approach in action. Let’s continue to introspect in other elements to understand what issues are addressed with the help of DITA for the technical documentation creation process.
A map is a list of indications to a set of some particular topics. It determines topics to incorporate into the deliverables. The map also establishes the order and hierarchy of the topics and ensures browsing, such as TOC and cross-topic links in the final deliverable. Maps can be created at any time, even before the topics’ development. Additionally, maps can create multiple deliverables from a single set of topics. Typically, more than half of topics are used in multiple maps. You should remember not to create a dependency between topics, they should be context-neutral. Because in case of some changes in such dependent topics, your reader may go on the wrong path. You can also use a single map for multiple deliverables. Maps can point not only to topics but also to other maps. Using maps gives you flexibility but can significantly complicate the understanding of the process. In cases you need only two or three output variants with the set of topics that are 90% concurrent, the creation of separate maps for each output can bring in extra overhead.
Output formats allow producing various deliverables suitable for different purposes (posting to the web, printing, etc.) from a content. By default, the DITA-OT provides output formats for:
Also, you can develop your own output format. It can be modified to match the templates you developed in the tools you used before, for example, Microsoft Word. But it’s not an easy task to do.
Output formats can control the arrangement of your deliverables since DITA uses semantic tagging rather than format tagging. Semantic tagging helps to indicate the nature of the content. Each output format has the corresponding settings for the target file type. It means that you define how and in what form each element must be included in the output, based on the type of such element: topic, main content, link element, numbered list, etc.
The most evident advantages of using DITA are the following:
So, basically, you create some topic just once, and DITA helps you use it in multiple deliverables for different purposes. And if you have multiple outputs with overlapping content, it is convenient to use DITA.
However, every story has two sides. And here’s the other side of DITA’s:
You must decide whether you really need such a standard in your work. If you do not update your documents regularly or reuse the same content in various combinations, maybe you can do just fine without DITA.
The next issue is the price: the shift to DITA demands a significant infusion of resources – CMSs can be expensive to implement with DITA. It requires experts to manage the transition. You’ll probably spend a lot of time developing your information architecture rather than writing the docs for your company. In addition to the reliable CMS itself, that you need to buy. This is about an investment of tens of thousands of dollars and 12-18 months of hard work, in some cases, even more. Moreover, staffing is quite a challenge. Not so many people know DITA, that’s why their salaries are high. If put together all these points, DITA may prove to be not so cost-effective. Usually, it’s a bundle for small and medium businesses.
Another problem is acceptance: documentation managers must decide on what to rewrite, reuse, convert, and neglect. It’s not an easy task if you have several managers: each has a certain set of documents that they consider important, so the settling of this issue may raise a conflict, which is time-consuming and may delay the transition considerably.
One more important point is training since DITA is not so simple as one might think. It takes time and money. Some writers like to keep with the traditions and do not like to leave their comfort zone, so they protest against the process. And a technical writer must distract a lot to understand DITA, it’s not as intuitive as they put it.
Now, when DITA is not just a word for you, and you understand the core concepts, let me tell you about your other option. If you need to make a professional approach to user documentation, you can use ClickHelp. This online documentation tool addresses the same issues much easier.
ClickHelp is a cloud-based tool with no need of installing anything. You can sign up and get your own ready-made portal in the vendor’s cloud. It protects access for authors with SSO, or you can use simple login and password. ClickHelp works in a web browser from any place in the world. You can easily run a review process for your content, publish, and update your user guides quickly.
Let’s have a look at professional technical writing functions that ClickHelp offers and how they cover DITA use cases:
“With ClickHelp, you get a ready-made documentation site with the teamwork functions and documentation hosting.”
Implementation of such standards as DITA is a long-range project that consumes time, money, and human resources. And grasping at new trends because everyone is following them is not the right way to go. Instead, maybe you need to take time, look around, and find another alternative for your documents to be structured. ClickHelp might be just what fits you best – content reuse and dynamic output are paired with the ease of use for better documentation delivery. Give it a try, and you will see that DITA is not the only approach to professional documentation writing.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
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