Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA
Series: ATTW book series in technical and professional communication
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2019
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780815393818; 9780815393825; 9781351187510
Copyright date: 2019
Subjects: Programming languages (electronic computers)
First sentence: In the summer of 2004, I was on my way to Blacksburg, Virginia, to start my new job as assistant professor of technical communication at Virginia Tech.
Description: Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA documents the evolution of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) – a widely used open standard for structuring technical content. DITA has grown in popularity and features since its origins as an internal grammar for structuring technical documentation at IBM. This book introduces Lightweight DITA (LwDITA, which should be read as "Lightweight DITA") as a proposed version of the DITA standard that reduces its dependence on complex Extensible Markup Language (XML) structures and simplifies its authoring experience. This volume aims to reconcile discrepancies and similarities in methods for authoring content in industry and academia and does so by reporting on DITA’s evolution through the lens of computational thinking, which has been connected in scholarship and media to initiatives for learning to code and programming.

Evia’s core argument is that if technical communicators are trained with principles of rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking, they can create structured content in lightweight workflows with XML, HTML5, and Markdown designed to reduce the learning curve associated with DITA and similar authoring methodologies. At the same time, this book has the goal of making concepts of structured authoring and intelligent content easier to learn and teach in humanities-based writing and communication programs. This book is intended for practitioners and students interested in structured authoring or the DITA standard.
Table of contents: label: List of Figures
title: viii; label: Preface
title: xiii; label: Acknowledgements
title: xvi; label: Foreword
title: xviii; label: 1
title: Revisiting the Future of Technical Communication
pagenum: 1; label: 2
title: Before Intelligent Content, There Was the Computer Manual
pagenum: 32; label: 3
title: How DITA Evolved into LwDITA
pagenum: 60; label: 4
title: The LwDITA Initial Authoring Formats
pagenum: 81; label: 5
title: The LwDITA Map Components
pagenum: 91; label: 6
title: The LwDITA Topic Components
pagenum: 103; label: 7
title: The Abstractions Behind Intelligent Content
pagenum: 149; label: 8
title: Abstractions in the LwDITA Content Lifecycle
pagenum: 164; label: Conclusion: Remaking the Future of Technical Communication with LwDITA
title: 198; label: Index
title: 202