No-one who has taken an interest in developments in technical publications over the last few years, and certainly no-one who has followed the themes of recent meetings of the STC UK Chapter, can have failed to hear about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, or DITA. DITA was at the heart of many presentations at the X-Pubs Conference 2006, which I attended on 20th and 21st June at the Gatwick Hilton. The conference was arranged and managed by Mekon Ltd., ( http://www.mekon.com ).

The conference was addressed by many of the world's leading experts on content management, XML publications technology, and DITA, including Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, Michael Priestley, and JoAnn Hackos. And it was JoAnn Hackos who, in her closing keynote address, made the assertion that "DITA changes everything". This is a challenging and provocative statement, and it sounds a little familiar: haven't we been told before that this or that new technology was going to change the face of technical documentation, only to find out that in fact it was just a passing fad? Despite my innate cynicism, I came away from the X-Pubs Conference believing that Hackos may be right, and that DITA technology is really significant.

It was clear from the breadth of practical experience that the various conference speakers reported on that DITA is no longer the preserve of the geeks on the bleeding edge of content reuse, but it is entering into the technical publications mainstream. And it was equally clear from both the commercial presentations and the vendor exhibition that there are now a variety of products available that can support technical authors and content managers who want to start implementation.

Although DITA is now a publicly maintained standard, it was first developed and used at IBM, where staff from both hardware and software development groups worked together on developing an XML architecture that would support their document publishing needs. The strength of DITA's architecture derives from the two facets which, borrowed from evolutionary biology, put the word "Darwin" into its name: inheritance and specialisation. Michael Priestley from IBM (one of the authors of the DITA 1.0 specification) described how specialisation works in DITA, and Ian Larner, also from IBM, described how DITA was being used in hundreds of projects across the company.

Scott Abel reported on the experiences of tech writers who are already involved in DITA implementation, calling his talk "lessons learned from the trenches". The central message that Scott came back with was that moving to DITA could be complicated, and that it was worthwhile finding an experienced consultant to guide you through the process, and ensuring your staff had adequate training. Ann Rockley addressed the question of Return on Investment for content management strategies, and concluded that a long-term view was vital. She explained that the greater the potential for reuse, the greater the savings and the sooner a return would be realised. Even so, the costs of moving to XML and DITA based authoring can be quite high, and probably remain beyond the reach of may small and medium enterprises, at least for the time being.

JoAnn Hackos, however, spoke directly to technical authors at the conference, and called on us to move away from books, and from the idea that a book was a useful metaphor for the delivery of technical information, and to move towards to topic-oriented writing instead. Research has shown that users want easy to find, easy to use, up to date, task-oriented information, and they want less of it - they want just enough to do their jobs and no more.

According to Hackos, to become part of the corporate world of this new century, technical communicators need to change their roles, their processes, and their information models. Instead of being proud of their abilities to write, and edit, and illustrate, and publish, individual technical communicators must learn to specialise in one area, and to collaborate with their peers. We need to realise the importance of detailed planning before we start writing, and in particular we need to plan for content reuse even before we write any content. We need to use XML and DITA to create a semantic mark-up which structures and tags our text for its content and meaning, not just for its formatting and presentation.

These are serious challenges, and I believe we all need to be thinking about them, even if we are in smaller organisations for which the opportunities to move to DITA are not yet ripe. Technical authors have been pursuing the goal of single-sourcing for years now, and corporations are looking to save money by taking a strategic approach to content management. DITA is an opportunity for these two goals, the professional and the corporate, to converge. We cannot afford to ignore it.