by Bill Sawyer
DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is a specification used extensively by user assistance teams (i.e., doc writers, tech writers, curriculum devs, instructional designers, etc.). To be fair, it is a specification that has both advocates and detractors, with the vast majority of people in the middle who just want to get a job done.
- An advocate example – Technical writing and DITA
- A detractor example – Why you should ditch DITA and adopt headless instead
- Two middle examples – Markdown or reStructuredText or DITA? and Why does XML suck?
Oracle’s User Assistance teams primarily use DITA. I say primarily because, as with any large organization, if I make a 100% guarantee of 100% usage (is that a 10,000% remark? Someone check my math!) there will undoubtedly be some group (or groups) within Oracle that will chime-in to point out the error in my statement. Is Oracle’s use of DITA perfect? No. Does Oracle use DITA without challenges? No. Is using DITA at Oracle horrible? No. In other words, Oracle’s use of DITA is somewhere in the middle.
As with many organizations, large and small, there are talented people who think long, deep, and well about these complex topics, and then they write things worth sharing. Here are some of the DITA resources that Oracle developed.