In episode 83 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Jake Campbell talk about the next generation of DITA. What happens when you need to update your existing DITA structure?
“When you’re building everything out the first time around, you can do as much user acceptance testing as you want—but the best user acceptance testing is going to be live testing.”
—Jake Campbell

Related links: 

* Improving DITA workflow

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @JakeScriptorium

Transcript:
GK:                   Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about the next generation of DITA, what happens when you need to update your existing DITA structure? Hello everyone and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
JC:                    And I’m Jake Campbell.
GK:                   And we’re going to be talking about updating your DITA content structure today so I think we want to start by just briefly talking about DITA itself and the kind of different generations or versions that it goes through for those who are unfamiliar. Jake, can you just give us a little overview of that?
JC:                    The earliest version of DITA that I’m familiar working with actually started back in 2006, DITA 1.1, and that lacked a lot of the modern conveniences that we’ve become accustomed to in DITA today, particularly when it comes to actually customizing the DITA structure. You weren’t able to do things like specialize attributes, some reuse capabilities I think we’re kind of limited. And now we’ve got a lot of very specialized topic types. We have a broad suite of specializations available out of the box for some purpose built usage, things like the troubleshooting domain or some of the more specialized element, like hazard statement for when a standard note won’t do.
GK:                   Right. And I think a lot of these kind of differences between each version of DITA because we’ve gone, as you said, from that earliest 1.1 to 1.2 and the now we’re in 1.3, and I think one of the big driving forces behind that has just been this idea of seeing how people use DITA, how people need to use DITA and what changes sort of needs to be made to that out of the box content model to kind of help make sure that all those features are available. There’s definitely been, I think, kind of a few major evolutions that we’ve seen.
JC:                    Yeah, definitely. And a lot of what’s available now is kind of in response to what people have needed. And we’ve actually seen with some clients who need to move their content model from DITA 1.2 to DITA 1.3 or in some cases DITA 1.1. to DITA 1.3, there are some things that they had specialized or that they had built specific semantic structures around that are now actually part of the base DITA model as of 1.3.
GK:                   That’s actually a really good segue into the next question I wanted to ask, which is what are some of the reasons that you might want to update your DITA content model? And I think you already kind of touched on that with the idea of being able to include features that you couldn’t before and then suddenly those start to become available in the latest version of DITA.
JC:                    Yeah. And the kind of most sweeping way that you kind of realize that’s happening when you move into a new version of DITA is some of topic types that become available. I remember when the DITA 1.