Date: Monday, Nov 7, 2005.
Time: Dinner 7pm - 8.30pm / Presentation 8.45pm - 10.30pm
Location: FIAP Jean Monnet, 30, rue Cabanis, Paris 14 (http://www.fiap.asso.fr/)
Guest speakers: Dr. JoAnn Hackos (Comtech Services/CIDM), Jerry Silver (Blast Radius)
Topic: DITA: Moving From Books to Topics
Cost: €20 STC members/students, €35 non members, Dinner (optional): €24 per person
Format: Presentation "DITA: Moving From Books to Topics" by Dr JoAnn Hackos + Presentation "Challenges and solutions for authoring in DITA" and product demonstration of XMetaL Author DITA Edition by Jerry Silver.
Attendance:
16 members and 16 non-members. There were just over 40 who signed up, so attendance was about 75% of the expected draw. 17 attendees joined our two speakers for dinner before the meeting at the on-site restaurant. The FIAP again proved to be a good location: easy parking; not far from the metro; a bar for a drink if you get there early; and meeting rooms of varying sizes.
Minutes:
Announcement of upcoming meetings:
STC European Competition Awards meeting and dinner on Saturday, January 21, 2006 in London.
STC France Chapter one-day conference on Friday, March 24, 2006.
Call for volunteers:
The STC France Chapter conference will need volunteers, just as the chapter generally needs volunteers. We are looking for people with experience handling events or who want to get that experience.
Call for candidates:
The March 24 meeting will also be the general assembly and election. Please consider joining the board.
About the Speakers:
Stuart Culshaw, STC France Chapter president, introduced our two speakers for the evening:
Dr. JoAnn Hackos is President of Comtech Services and Director of the Center for Information-Development Management. She is a Fellow and Former President of STC and is a founder with IBM of the OASIS Technical Committee for the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard.
Jerry Silver has over 20 years of IT experience, specializing in content management, collaboration, database and application modeling and design, application architectures, XML, and Web technologies. He spent 15 years at Oracle in a variety of technical roles, most recently as Principal Product Manager of Oracle Application Server Portal and also served as Director of Product Strategy with content management vendor NCompass Labs, now part of Microsoft, before joining Blast Radius.
STC France Chapter President Stuart Culshaw presents JoAnn Hackos with The Good Bird Guide as a thank-you gift.
Presentations:
DITA : Moving from Books to Topics
JoAnn explained that DITA is the "embodiment of best practices" towards which technical communicators have been working for years.
Desktop publishing and SGML-based applications led us to continue creating books with structure based on the visual formatting. HTML continued to reinforce the emphasis on formatting structure, although the move towards topics was underway. Books do not correspond to users’ need to get specific information quickly, while topics can be taken individually or assembled to suit the user’s immediate need. This topic-based architecture isn't appropriate for all types of books, but is particularly suited to user manuals and reference guides. Regardless of the tools you use, this topic-based architecture offers many advantages.
DITA Topics are meaningful, stand-alone units of information. There are three basic types of information in the DITA design: concept, task and reference. Through use of attributes you can get what other systems call variables and conditional text and you can use filters to allow overlapping attributes. You can generate output documents that only include appropriate information, based on multiple attribute criteria - for example, only including content appropriate for HTML or PDF output, or only content relating to a specific product version or user profile.
DITA is not a tool - it’s an information design architecture.
JoAnn illustrated her presentation with examples of DITA-compliant documentation and online help for AutoCad. The DITA-based documentation has been met with great enthusiasm by AutoCad users.
XMetaL Author DITA Edition
Jerry Silver, Director of Product Management at BLAST RADIUS, took advantage of JoAnn’s introduction to DITA, to go straight into a brief demonstration of XMetaL Author DITA Edition, a full-featured authoring tool that natively supports the DITA specification. That means that you do not have to go through hard-coding XML tags in Wordpad. You can create or edit topics by pulling in previously created chunks or creating new ones and you can see how your document is structured. In fact, you are guided by the structure instructions if you are creating a new topic. You can preview the output easily in HTML or PDF so you can see what it looks like, if you need to.
Given the limited time available, Jerry was only able to demonstrate a few of XMetaL Author for DITA's features, but thankfully he had brought along enough demo version CDs for everyone (which he exchanged for bueiness cards) and also announced that Blast Radius would be giving a Webinar on December 1 2005 with more information about the product, and in particular issues facing users with existing FrameMaker documentation. The webinar will be at 7:00 p.m. Paris time (10am Vancouver time) on December 1st. At the time of writing, the webinar is not yet posted on the Blast Radius site, but you can check the following page for signup information, coming soon: http://www.xmetal.com/en_us/news/online_events/index.x
The meeting ended around 10.45pm, following a short question and answer session.