A lot of discussions and confusion in social media has recently, as it seems, dealt with two issues concerning the use of DITA (see for example a discussion in the DITA awareness group on linkedIn or another discussion on LinkedIn or a blog post by Tom Johnson). The first issue relates to the question if topics shall be nested or not, that is, shall DITA topics be kept as separate files or shall authors instead use a <dita> document and nest topics within it?

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Two weeks after the fact, I'm still processing stuff I learned at the conference. Over two and a half days with four tracks of presentations, there wasn't a single hour when I didn't want to be in at least two places at once.

I'm told there were over 350 attendees from 17 countries around the world, many of them new to DITA. The conference provided incredible depth of technical content, but will definitely need more introductory sessions or workshops next year as well to balance things out. The community is growing!

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Many companies know that customers want new types of content and dynamic delivery but organizations appear hesitant and feel unready to face the challenges. It is a fact that the technical communication community needs to move away from delivering manuals as linear books where content is organized in static arbitrary hierarchies (= table of content). What are the alternatives? Well, the technical communication community can learn much from the academic research community who has used an innovative way of organizing research articles. It is all about making information findable.

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The lightweight DITA proposal for DITA 1.3 is starting to come together. The proposal responds to requirements from the community for a lightweight version of DITA to ease adoption by groups who don't need all the features of full DITA.

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New client, new challenges … including a rapidly-evolving software product. Different clients are using different versions, bug-fixes and incremental changes affect one or two pages out of a couple of hundred – "Niels!" the developers cry: "what can we do?"

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