As the DITA standard celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, we reflect on its existence over the last decade and note how much has changed in the way we think about structured technical documentation. DITA continues to evolve with the DITA 1.3 specification expected to officially release by the end of 2015 and Lightweight DITA pointing to other ways the standard can be used.
The birth of DITA
IBM developed Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) in the early 2000s when it needed to upgrade its proprietary, SGML-based Information Structure Identification Language (ISIL) and resolve its issues with producing standardized content.
During this process, XML was introduced, providing a new, more concise way to formulate data formats. The World Wide Web also came into its own at this time, which forced technical writers to rethink the prevailing book model in favor of a (web) page-based model. This was further refined into a more granular and typed topic-based model. As a result, DITA began to grow and IBM released the idea freely to the OASIS standards body.
Many things have happened since the initial release of DITA 1.0 in June 2005. As of 2015, the authoring and publishing software tools industry has grown to meet the challenges of working with ...
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