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Above in this comment thread: DITA and wiki combo

Fix for ContentWrangler link

Posted by Don Day at 2007-01-13 16:27

FWIW, the particular link for the Crystal Ball topic by Scott Abel is at: http://thecontentwrangler.com/article/crystal_ball_a_dita_wiki/ . It's still a visionary article, and the emergence of DITA Storm now makes it only a matter of time and integration for some of the first implementations to hit the air. I think there is a whole 'nother blog commentary ahead, surmising on what kind of content or support situation is best for live update of the DITA source, but the pieces are now all in place for things to happen.

dita and wikis

Posted by Todd Katz at 2007-01-15 16:16

Following up on Dee Elling's comment, here's a simple technical doc we created in the Confluence wiki (the PDF creation is a one button operation):

http://edocs.bea.com/alsb/docs26/pdf/aldsp_transport_for_alsb2_6.pdf

Although it would probably have been easier to create this in Framemaker, there are a lot of advantages to using a wiki, especially when it comes time for changes to be made in the document.

My personal opinion as to whether a wiki can scale to more major documentation challenges, it would seem that if a wiki can scale to contain an exponentially growing cohesive rendition of all the world's knowledge, it probably can handle a hardware or software doc set. Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, when will an XML editor and specialized CMS be required in order to keep wikipedia from becoming hopelessly confused (or confusing)?

The real challenge is creating a good hierarchy of information which would replace the book paradigm. While metadata to facilitate specialized searches would be nice, in reality (again, my opinion) 97% of users will be happy with what Google brings back from introspecting popular pages and xrefs.

Link corrected, thanks

Posted by Anne Gentle at 2007-01-15 17:10

Thanks, Don -- I corrected the link to Content Wrangler's crystal ball post in this entry. Next I need to go through the rest of my archives and figure out what other links are out-of-date. :)

DITA Structured Blogging Plugin

Posted by Scott Abel at 2007-01-16 05:41

Just a quick update: The DITA Structured Blogging plug-ins I spoke to you about before you went on maternity leave are to be released to the public later this Spring at the Documentation and Training Conference in Vancouver, BC. (www.doctrain.com) The plug-ins are currently being modeled and will be created shortly thereafter. We hope to test them in both Moveable Type and WordPress and then release them through the structured blogging website (www.structuredblogging.org).

I'll keep you posted,

Scott Abel
abelsp@netdirect.net
TheContentWrangler.com