Stupid DITA Tricks: Treating aircraft manuals as DITA using after-the-fact specialization
Presentation Abstract
How to handle non-DITA content that you want to apply all the DITA goodness to? What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? Can you use specialization after the fact to treat non-DITA markup as DITA? This presentation describes our experience trying to manage Airbus Minimum Equipment List document source as DITA in a DITA content management system with a minimum of modification to the data (ideally none). Can it be done? Is it a good idea? What did we find? Tl;dr: It worked mostly.
What can attendees expect to learn?
Describes a somewhat unique (and possibly daft) way of dealing with non-DITA data in a DITA environment. Should be instructive and possibly entertaining.
Meet the Presenter
Eliot Kimber is a founding member of the DITA Technical Committee and a long-time SGML and XML practitioner. Eliot was a founding member of the W3C XML Working Group, a co-author of the ISO HyTime standard, and a contributor to the XSLT and XSL-FO specifications. He runs a small consultancy and in his spare time develops open-source solutions for the DITA and larger XML communities, including the DITA for Publishers and DITA Community projects, among others. Eliot lives and works in Austin, Texas. Eliot holds a first-degree black belt in Aikido. Eliot is author of DITA for Practitioners, Vol. 1 from XML Press.