DITA is Dead!

I have published this obituary with indecent haste. DITA clings to life and is yet a healthy if petulant corpse: kicking and screaming as it is dragged down the green mile.

I begin with a pronouncement certain to grab your attention, but perhaps incite your ire too. After reading my (unsealed) bull, you might conclude that my craven attention-seeking is neither too previous nor without a modicum of merit.

I start with an aside, which is perhaps also a warning. I am frequently reprimanded for a focus on the shadowy world of software and not on the means of production: the real world of products and chattels. However, I shall, perhaps ineffectively in many peoples judgement, seek to illustrate how my words apply there also.

Let us stare together at the half-remembered past. DITA had not yet been brought kicking and screaming into this world. A recognition of the need for content that was user-orientated and emphasized task completion, arose as computing escaped from the ivory towers of academia and the dank basements of Government in to the glare of almost-popular utilization. Popular here means more than six.

The work done by the pioneers at IBM-this is not a dual for appropriate recognition so forgive my simplification-was completed within a very particular paradigm. I would assert that the results were not the inevitable outcome of some immutable funnel, but very much determined by its time and place. The art of the soon to be possible. Indeed, perhaps a mirage falsely promising an oasis that would never quench your thirst for salvation from the terror of the user manual.

DITA (and the orthodoxy of structured content with it) escaped from its petri dish. It spread: infecting one team after another like a louse on the body-compute.

DITA seemed to excel, if indeed it did at all, at the creation of vast documentation libraries, speaking as many toungues as you desired, by teams following a litany of common practice and convention. It was a schismatic faith. A multitude of covens and clans convened by high-priests and priestesses long-schooled in its arcane praxis. Initiation into the cult was long and tortuous.

DITA content is too often stranded stoically, like a Stylite on an intricately carved alabaster column, oblivious to the stream of innovation passing below slowly denuding its once impeccable and splendid isolation. Collaborative and iterative code creation practices, the rise of agility and cloud nativeness and perhaps most devastatingly, composite products built on a culture of open-source and co-operative development, have been greeted by a steely indifference. Glacial content creation practices leaving behind weathered nuggets of value on an otherwise desolate scree are a desultory response.

DITA, by its nature, eschews community development by erecting impenetrable barriers to cooperation. It silos even the most basic theater of storytelling, reaction and audience participation. Content creators are both removed from the collective sharing of code creation and evolution and self-consciously sole-practitioners of dark and obscure arts such as tagging, metadata injection and uploading to lonesome repositories defined by separatism and recalcitrance.

Making DITA supposedly easy, and even more beguiling, a service, are but a laudanum to relieve the DITA-practicing masses dudgeon. DITA is by its design the antithesis of agile openness. It is a morass of complexity with a codex of rules, practice and conventions that ensure a stultifying molasses, unresponsive to the changing reality passing it by. DITA is characterized by viscosity and a hubristic listlessness.

I shall now return to my aside. Industry 4.0 and the Neo-ization of everything, promises that the cataclysms that have thus far been confined to the world of software will soon exert their potential on the production and delivery of almost everything. There will not even be the illusion of choice; the option of red or blue. Amongst many soon-to-be realities, the capability to design and compose products on the fly from prepackaged components that seamlessly plugin and play, fundamentally changes the requirements for user support. A revolution indeed, and one that DITA can neither suppress nor address.

To secure a place in the digital economy, content creators must banish obscurantism and embrace collaboration and openness in everything we do. We must stop trying to define potential in the crib of creation and instead enable the user to shape and consume content at will. We need structured content without a doubt, but it must be structured for the benefits of the user and not the creator.

So what comes next?

Molecular content

Defining push and pull gates for molecular content

The perfect content creator