FYI ... the OASIS email server seems to be up and down ... FYI . . . I posted this content to our wiki this morning:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/DITA_Perceptions
Stan
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[Stan Doherty, January 18 2011] -- When I do demos and free consulting for groups in the Boston, I tend to interact with pubs managers and writers who are fairly technical and have attended introductory DITA training, but are not completely sold on DITA. When they voice concerns, here's what I hear.
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DITA is not a solution for everyone. In terms of the current sociology within the profession, DITA is not really optimized for or focused on what writers do day to day. It's optimized now for consultants, architects, and tools developers.
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DITA is not associated with familiar authoring tools. As a writer, I do not write to markup standards or APIs, I write in a particular authoring tool for one or more specific delivery formats. No one polices what it means to be a DITA-compliant tool, so there's risk for me adopting a suite of uncertified and unsupported tools. No one GUARANTEES that a particular suite of tools will work together six months from now.
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DITA had been promoted as a solution that small groups could implement without big budgets for consulting and tools development. Was that ever true? Is it still true?
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DITA is considered overly difficult or complex because it lacks a clear learning path or assistive technology (tool). How can I tell which of the hundreds of elements are:
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the first/easiest ones to learn and master?
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the absolute, required ones? the advanced, optional ones?
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the ones germane to my job/role as a writer? the ones germane to other roles?
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DITA usage patterns and/or deployment models are not explicitly correlated to its feature set.
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Which features are used predominantly by startups? small groups?
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Which features are used predominantly or exclusively by consultants or tools vendors?
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Which features are used principally by enterprise organizations?
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Which features do not get used by anyone in particular?
I suspect that if we had an open-source, DITA-compliant editor to complement the open-source, DITA-compliant Open Toolkit, the folks with tool anxieties would have a common starting place for learning and piloting DITA. If there were a shared and detailed learning path through DITA 1.2 features, the folks with overload anxieties would be happier. Pubs managers and writers do not have clear points of entry or engagement with the spec, so they are vulnerable to DITA critics who argue that investing time to figure it all out on their own is not worth the effort. If an alternative to DITA can do 25% of DITA in ways that small groups can implement confidently, that's better than failing to implement 0% of the complete DITA.