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By suggesting DITA as a valid alternative to Markdown, for any use, this has so completely lost the plot that it blows up whatever credibility Brian might have
by starkparker 11mo ago
By suggesting DITA as a valid alternative to Markdown, for any use, this has so completely lost the plot that it blows up whatever credibility Brian might have on the subject. It's disappointing, because I know of Brian and otherwise respect his work.
Short of writing in raw Postscript, I can't think of a more completely different set of strengths, audiences, and applications. I had to get to a company with more than 5,000 employees, 20 product lines, and 5 required i18n locales to find one where the overhead, god-awful ergonomics, and half-broken tooling of DITA were appropriate for the scale of the work _and also_ resourced enough to paper over every miserable facet of its implementation.
If you're using Markdown today _at all_ for a task, DITA isn't appropriate for it. If DITA was appropriate for the task, you never would've picked Markdown to accomplish it to begin with. Don't waste your time with it either way.
- euroderf 11mo agoYa don't often see this kind of vocal disappointment directed at DITA. Can you provide more info about how exactly DITA+tooling fell on its face ?
- getnormality 11mo agoWow, I've never heard of DITA, so I was totally unprepared for how funny this was going to be. "Markdown is not great for writing complex documentation. Why not use XML instead?"
- adamretter 11mo agoI'm really surprised I didn't see any mention of LwDITA yet. It can be expressed in XML, HTML, or Markdown. For us it is the sweet spot between the too little provided by Markdown, and the too much provided by DITA or DocBook