Checking out the new DITA Users website
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I was looking at DITA Storm, the
web-based DITA editor, for a side project today and came across a link
touting "comprehensive project-level DITA authoring and publishing
experience." I'm pretty excited about this discovery -- it's ditausers.org, a place where I can try
out the web-based DITA editor on a hosted web server. And, it's free
membership right now with reasonable rates later. The coupon code is BETA,
just go through the checkout system and use Coupon as your method of
payment. Nifty!
As for my dabblings with DITA Storm itself, I couldn't convince my home
system administrator (my husband) to help me install it on our webserver at
home. Our Apache installation would have to be upgraded (one method of
implementing DITA Storm needs an Apache Web Server extension that includes
PHP with XSL such as Sablotron) and I don't
blame him for turning down that work request. I didn't want to do the
upgrade myself either. DITA Users has the right idea of installing the web
server for you if you just want to author and publish DITA with little
backend work yourself.
DITA Storm always gets me thinking about what's next for web-browser
editors and DITA. I wonder if a concept of a DITA audit is ready for prime
time? You know how you can upload and validate your HTML documents to test
forW3C Recommendations compliance, or 508 accessibility problems, such as
the W3C HTML Validation Service and others like it (see this list). I think
that some day writers might want to upload their DITA marked up documents to
test for best practices in tagging for their topics, especially for task. I
believe that IBM has CSS files that automatically check on how well "typed"
certain content is after going through their migration tool. For example,
are ordered lists in a generic topic and should be re-written as tasks with
<step><cmd> elements? Is a validation step the next thing for
making sure you're using DITA to its fullest potential?
I plan to put the feed for the DITA Users Progress blog
in my feed reader list. Thanks for the free beta membership, guys!
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