OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization
by Andrzej Zydron
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Elements in the new specializations can share typographical characteristics of their forebears even though they may be called by a different name.
Figure 4. Inheritance
By providing a ready-built toolkit for the construction of technical documentation, DITA substantially reduces the cost of implementation. DITA comes with a prepackaged set of tools to construct books and manuals as well as complex web-page structures for free from the DITA Open Toolkit SourceForge site.
In order to put together a publication from individual topics, DITA uses the "bookmap" concept. A "bookmap" allows the publisher to decide which topics go into a given publication.
Figure 5. Bookmap
DITA also has some very powerful mechanisms for conditional processing, depending on environmental settings for such items as model name, etc. The following example shows how conditional processing can be used:
<p audience="administrator">Set the configuration options for administrators:
<ul>
<li product="extendedprod">Set foo to bar for extended product support</li>
<li product="basicprod extendedprod">Set your blink rate for basic and extended products</li>
<li>Do some other stuff just for administrators</li>
<li platform="unix">Do a special thing on Unix systems</li>
</ul>
</p>
DITA allows conditional processing depending on the attribute values for given elements. In the above example, the "p" element will only be published if the environmental variable "audience" has the value "administrator". Likewise, the "li" elements will only be published if the relevant "product" and "platform" attributes have the required settings.
One of the main benefits of DITA from the standardization point of view is that most of the work regarding the XML Schema construction has already been done for you. Previously, introducing a custom built XML Schema would have entailed lots of work and the associated costs of hiring a consultancy or specialist. DITA provides a ready-made, pre-built generic XML environment for authoring and publication. The full DITA Open Source Toolkit provides transformations for HTML, PDF, and RTF output as well as many other utilities and examples. The other benefit of standardization is that there is extensive support now available from XML editors and content management systems for DITA, making implementation simpler and cheaper. In addition, there has been a rapid build up of Documentation, Training, and Consultancy resources for DITA. All of these make for easier and cheaper implementation.
If your existing documentation is already in a "topic" or "task" type format, then moving to DITA should be relatively simple as long as there is direct mapping between the existing elements used and DITA elements. It may even be possible to develop a specialization of the existing DITA into the incumbent element names and attributes. Another factor that makes the move to DITA easier is if your existing documents use the CALS table model that DITA supports.
DITA is not only for technical manuals. It can be easily adapted to other subject matter such as eLearning, warranty, or service bulletin publications.
As with all good things, there are some aspects that need to be considered carefully. DITA does have some potential issues that you should bear in mind:
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Element nesting. DITA has unfortunately followed the HTML principle that nearly every element can appear in another element. This can cause horrible problems with publishing and translation, where segmentation and typography can go badly awry.
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Many DITA elements can occur inline with text, which can cause substantial problems for both composition and translation if not restricted.
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The linking mechanism for conditional text can cause problems with localization.
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Topic-based publishing requires the use of a content management system, especially if you are also translating into other languages; otherwise, control of versions and synchronization with different language versions becomes very difficult.
XML-based Text Memory—xml:tm
xml:tm is a new LISA standard that is a directly compatible with DITA. It takes the DITA principle of reuse and applies it at the sentence level. Integration with DITA is seamless.
Whereas traditional translation memory systems have only concentrated on the translation aspect of the document lifecycle, xml:tm goes deeper into the process, establishing the concept of "text memory." Each sentence (text unit) in the document is given a unique identifier. This identifier remains immutable for the life of the document. xml:tm uses the XML namespace mechanism to achieve this.
xml:tm is comprised of two core concepts:
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Author memory
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Translation memory
