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Subject: appropriateness of <dita> root element
I wanted to add a voice to the discussion towards the end of today's TC call about the effectiveness and appropriateness of the "ditabase" content model and approach to DITA adoption. Organizations deploy DITA for a variety of reasons. This may or may not include a need for topic-level content reuse. Not every organization will benefit from all of the capabilities of DITA. In deployments where topic-level content reuse was _not_ a driving factor, I've seen organizations struggle to map legacy content to DITA topic types, without a corresponding benefit. (Surely some benefit, but not clearly justified by the required effort to do so). I've also seen organizations compress migration time from years to months by mapping legacy content to the generic DITA "topic" type in nested structures. I'm troubled by the characterization that file structures which contain multiple nested topics are "not much better than Word." The ditabase structure allows organizations to achieve multi-channel publishing, metadata- and output-based content filtering, and slashing of localizations costs through automated publishing, while minimizing the pain of legacy migration. As a TC, I think we need to take care not to belittle or discourage these benefits or this approach to migration in particular circumstances. Otherwise, we risk sending the message (implicitly or explicitly) that DITA is not appropriate except when substantial topic-level reuse is a requirement. -Alan -- Alan Houser, President Group Wellesley, Inc. 412-363-3481 www.groupwellesley.com
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