In episode 95 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kris Eberlein (chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee) discuss the upcoming release of 2.0. What can you expect if you are currently in DITA? And what do you need to know if you are considering DITA?

“If you’ve been shoehorning diagnostic information into troubleshooting topics,  you’re going to have a good semantic place to put that content with DITA 2.0.”

–Kris Eberlein

Related links: 

* OASIS DITA Technical Committee

* Contours of DITA 2.0, presentation by Kristen James Eberlein, Eberlein Consulting LLC

* Contact Kris: [email protected]; +1 919 622-1501; kriseberlein (skype)

Twitter handles:

* @sarahokeefe

* @kriseberlein

Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe:                   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.

SO:                   In this episode, we talk about what to expect with the upcoming release of DITA 2.0. Hi everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I have Kris Eberlein joining me today. She’s the Chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. Hey, Kris, welcome to the podcast.

Kris Eberlein:                   Hey, Sarah. Thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

SO:                   So happy to see you virtually. So today with the great opportunity to talk to Kris, we wanted to talk about the upcoming release of DITA 2.0, and in particular, talk about this from the perspective of current and future DITA users. We’re not going to do a full overview of the specification, but I will include a link to the draft specification and some other DITA resources that Kris has shared with us in the show notes. So if you need to do some basic research about DITA 2.0, you’ll have those resources there.

SO:                   But with that said, what I want to talk about today is where this is going and try and gain some of your perspective, Kris, on what’s happening here. So let’s talk about current DITA users. If I’m a current DITA user and I’m in DITA 1.2 or 1.3, what’s the most important thing? Or what are the dozen most important things that I need to know about DITA 2.0?

KE:                   Well, the first thing everybody needs to know, and this is user’s, tool vendors, the community, is that DITA 2.0 Is our first release that is not backwards compatible. For all the DITA 1.x releases, DITA 1.2, DITA 1.3, DITA Technical Committee really went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that all the changes we made were backward compatible. There just comes a time when you need to do some housekeeping, when you need to do cleanup, make changes, correct design mistakes, and have a backwards incompatible release. And that is DITA 2.0.

KE:                   So it’s going to present some new challenges that folks who have been in DITA for a while and have maybe gone from 1.1 to 1.2, or 1.2 to 1.3, new challenges that those folks haven’t experienced so far. It’s going to be a release that is well worth current DITA users upgrading to. We have added very robust support for audio and video. And I think probably for the first time, it’s going to make it fairly easy for folks to really have multimedia in their content without going jumping through some unnecessary hoops.

KE:                   And just in general,