DITA XML

the impulse to end up with Louis XIV, with decoration, and extras, and so forth, is something you always have to struggle against.

do like the term “learner.” “User” is passive, to me—you’ve been handed something, use it—whereas I think what people are doing is much more actively a matter of ownership and appropriation and coming to control a new tool in a new environment. And it is a matter of learning. It’s a matter of problem-solving. Besides being cumbersomely long—you could call them “problem-solvers….”

eally just a fundamental truth about learning. People need to act. We are, after all, talking about skill learning. We’re not talking about pondering abstract concepts or definitions or conceptual information, declarative information. It’s mostly skill learning and you learn skills by doing.

I would say that brevity is more a consequence of minimalism than a principle of minimalism. If you go back to what I was saying earlier about trying to facilitate the learner’s initiative and goals and aspirations and impede them less, you will most likely end up with a briefer design, or it might be layered. I was alluding earlier to David Farkas’s contribution to minimalism in the book Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel which had to do with layered designs. This was a way in his work of getting the information design out of the learner’s way, making the information layered so that it was available on demand, but not necessarily an impediment if the learner didn’t choose to look at it at that time.

we realized these people did have goals and they were experts, but they weren’t experts with the Displaywriter or the IBM PC. They were experts in office work, and they knew a lot about work practices, and processes, and objectives, and quality standards, and they knew more than we did. And we came to see that prior knowledge as an important resource that needed to be leveraged in the design of information, the design of training materials, and the design of user interfaces.

On the minus side, HTML content models have evolved well past the internal models that DITA assimilated in 1999, which causes these limitations: Web authors often organize content in patterns that DITA’s content model won’t allow. You can’t always author in DITA “as if it were HTML.” HTML5 has added elements for which there are no equivalent base forms in DITA. Normally, domain specialization in DITA can help rectify this mismatch, but because HTML5 is a “Living Standard” and can add or drop elements as it evolves, an ongoing tension remains between the two formats. Entering values for DITA’s various metadata structures is perhaps harder than it should be for light editing environments.