Of special interest to you might be the topic “Task: Authoring minimalist topics in an agile environment”.

Enjoy!: http://greyfiti.wikidot.com/sdg:gmeth-start-minimalism-greywalker-method

DITA is a particular implementation of XML that: A) provides a simple set of document types (task, concept, reference) that are all specialized from a single generic document type called “topic”. What makes DITA unique is that you can create new specializations of your own from any of these four base document types. And if you hand one of your specialized document types to another company that uses DITA but not your particular specialized document type, the DITA environment will automatically generalize your document upwards to one of the four base document types.

In plain English, this means that if you create a custom version of a “task” topic, for example, that contains some new custom tags you want to use in your company’s DITA/XML environment, when you hand that document to some other company, your new custom tags will be converted back to the original tag in the base “task” document type from which you originally specialized your custom tags. This surmounts a major hurdle with XML adoption, which is the simple fact that every company tweaks some published document type standard such as DocBook or DITA to their own liking, and once you’ve made such customizations, your XML files can no longer be used by anyone else without a lot of expensive transformation scripts being designed to convert your document types to their document types. DITA essentially automates all this transformation stuff for you.

So that’s DITA in a nutshell but again, there are many special concepts and jargons associated with DITA that you must layer on top of the basic concepts and jargon of XML. Again, your best bet is to start with the Wikipedia article on DITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture), and you might find it fruitful to explore some of the “external links” at the bottom.

I am enjoying this article, but it brings me to a side point. I have been trying to grasp the concept of DITA for years. I don’t consider myself to be stupid by any means, but one of the problems I have with understanding the purpose and use of DITA is sentences like this fragment from your article. “Some ingenious and unique techniques for specializing a generalized XML content model into new content models in a way that enables output processing to back-level its processing code to the style and transform rules of the generalized ancestors, if necessary, without “breaking” the output processing.” What does this mean? Am I being dense? In particular, what does “back-level its processing code to the style and transform rules of the generalized ancestors,” mean? Whenever I try to understand DITA I see sentences like this. Really, I’m not criticizing your writing, but is there somewhere I can read more basic information that doesn’t assume that level of vocabulary?

I hope to get more updates from your side and thanks for this fabulous work.

Sarah, I think this is exactly what my team is trying to do: tacking on a minimalist front-end. But given the documentation bloat, we’ve also been madly getting rid of large chunks of the “obvious” documentation that gets in the way of users finding the stuff they wouldn’t be able to figure out on their own.

I look forward to future posts on this topic.

On the bright side, there are at least some useful principles and techniques from minimalism that you can borrow and adapt to your topic-oriented authoring during sprints. It’s just that you can’t really use the entire approach. At some point soon I plan to make a blog post here detailing the specific things that you can successfully apply from minimalism in any one sprint.