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DITA is quickly becoming the XML standard for technical writers. New XML
editing tools are sprouting up that allow you to more easily write DITA content
without dealing with code. But Marlene says that she was on a budget; they opted
for a more basic XML editor and actually write all their documentation in native
XML. Rather than cumbersome, she says it’s quite easy and only takes about a
week before the writers become accustomed to it. The XSLT transforms posed more
difficulties, she says, but nothing insurmountable.

If you’re unfamiliar with DITA, it’s a way of tagging your content so that
the DITA Open Toolkit can transform it into a number of outputs, such as HTML
and PDF. The tags conform to a specific XML architecture, and your information
is chunked into small topics that can be arranged in different tables of
contents (”maps”).

DITA divides content into small, self-contained topics that can be reused in
different deliverables. The extensibility of DITA permits organizations to
define specific information structures and still use standard tools to work with
them. The ability to define company-specific and even group-specific information
architectures enables DITA to support content reuse and reduce information
redundancy.