Re: [dita-lightweight-dita] My Hello to OASIS LW DITA list

I've been deeply engaged in DITA for about 10 years. I first came across it when I was a tech pubs manager. I had been looking to move from FrameMaker to an XML standard when I found two articles written by Don and Michael about DITA on IBM's web site. I was immediately taken by DITA's architecture, especially the focus on modularity and specialization, and by the obviously pragmatic motivations of the designers.

These days, I am the developer of DITA InPrint (www.ditainprint.com), which enables end-users to easily style and publish DITA content to PDF and Microsoft Word. I developed DITA InPrint because of my own painful experience learning to customize the Open Toolkit's PDF stylesheets to get the high-quality outputs my clients require. I realized that getting brand-compliant PDF output was a big barrier to entry to DITA for small to medium-sized organizations, and I was willing to cannibalize my own Toolkit customization consulting business to get a tool out there that would help speed adoption of DITA beyond those corporations that can afford to hire people like me.

Likewise, I see lightweight DITA as a way to lower another barrier to adoption: the learning curve. I developed something very similar to lightweight DITA several years ago for the DITA training courses I provide, because out-of-the-box DITA was too overwhelming to most newcomers.

But I also am very much in favour of the other goals that Michael has identified, as a simpler mechanism of interchange with other types of markup and markdown. I have developed several transforms that do this sort of thing (UML to DITA, DITA to Mediawiki, DITA to Excel). I believe SMEs should not have to use new tools to work with DITA: they should be able to continue to use Enterprise Architect or Mediawiki or Excel or Eclipse to author and edit content. So I am particularly interested in contributing to the Authoring Format Definitions deliverable that Michael has identified.

Lastly, I was a technology journalist for many years, so I can help with writing and editing the content this sub-committee needs to produce.

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