DITA and Slideshows: Like inviting the pope to a rave?
DITA is about rules and getting straight to the point, it’s about helping users reach their goals as efficiently as possible. DITA is task-oriented. Slideshows are often about images, inspiration, getting started, they are useful to present new concepts/ideas that people can then explore in their own. The objective is to stimulate reflexion not to help the audience complete a specific task, although the 2 may meet in the context of training. Slides should contain as few words as possible. This rule does also applies to topics, yet few words in a topic is a lot more than few words on a slide. Can the 2 play well together? How about reuse? Spoiler: Inviting slideshows to our reuse party does make a lot more sense than getting the Pope to a rave
What can attendees expect to learn?
People are just starting to get their content to slides. HTML5 has been a great help and a lot of people are jumping on the opportunity, or at least contemplating it. The discussions so far have been about the technology, how content can actually be displayed on slides. I believe it’s also interesting to explore the issue from the content model perspective and from the user/audience perspective.
Meet the Presenter
France Baril, owner of Architextus Inc., is a DITA/XML consultant as well as a Documentation Architect who helps organizations analyze their content and processes, select tools, learn about DITA and/or XML, manage the change process, and develop supporting material (from DTDs or schemas to XSL transformations). She has a unique background with a BA in Communication from University of Ottawa and a BSc in Computer Science from University de Sherbrooke. She worked as a Documentation Architect for 5 years at IXIASOFT, where she served as Product Manager for their DITA CMS Framework. Before that, France has worked as a multimedia developer, a trainer, and a technical documentation specialist.