Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the IOD slides. I will download the latest version of Xopus, the last time I tried using it was version 3. I did not know about the latest plans for DITA compatibility with Xopus. That is exciting. I will definitely test 4.06 out soon. In addition to Arbortext, I also use a very simple web editor that I use occasionally for quick edits–will try replacing that with Xopus and see how it goes.

I have an additional challenge with DITA though, we use IBM specific DTDs most of the time rather than the Oasis DTDs. They are related but ours often have additions that are not yet proposed or rolled out into the DITA OT.

How challenging is it to add support for specializations beyond what is in the DITA OT?

At IOD Las Vegas IBM endorsed* four best of breed XML editors for DITA authoring: JustSystems XMetal and PTC Arbortext for power users, Quark for a Word based environment and Xopus for browser based environments.

The last two tools are targeted at non-technical authors, so I can imagine that you as an experienced DITA author would prefer the more powerful tools. However, we’re adding more DITA specific features in Xopus 4.1 which may entice you to sacrifice a bit of control for a lot of efficiency.

Feel free to contact me if you have Xopus specific questions or comments. I’m very interested in your thoughts about our software.

-Laurens

* Session 2459 Slide 13 available on: http://iod2009.confnav.com (account required)

I was referring specifically to web-based DITA editors. We use Arbortext Editor and a variety of IBM created tools to fill out the rest of the transformation and processing. We also have an information modeling tool that is available externally called IBM Information Architecture Workbench.

There are plenty of desktop editors out there that make working with DITA quite easy but often licensing costs are prohibitive from making these available to people other than the information developers. You definitely do not want to tell your non-DITA users to just make the changes in Notepad =) Arbortext, Oxygen, XMetal, Framemaker are just a few with DITA support.

It would probably be pretty easy to create a plugin for the TinyMCE editor or a few of the others that would give you basic DITA tagging.

I would be very interested in seeing a demo of your wiki if it comes to fruition. Thanks for commenting.

–Brett

In the interest of serving technical writers and documentation teams, I’m very interested in the DITA/wiki connection. One option I’ve considered is a set of plugins to the rich text editors you often see in WYSIWYG wikis to support a bridge between the semantic DITA-style markup and the format tags used in HTML.

-Matt W