Thanks for your comments. I hear what you’re saying and think that this topic is certainly going to be an important one as the industry increasingly adopts structured XML content management methodologies.

Scott Abel

The Content Wrangler

I say: What do you mean by “old structures”? My existing XML? My “old structures” were designed to precisely describe the dataset, so how is a move to a generic schema like DITA going to result in something more structured?

Hackos says: “You might have content that is already well structured in the original,” says Hackos. “Conversion to DITA is going to give you a lot of value.

I say: No it’s not.

Hackos says: Then you have some content that is so badly done that you don’t want to use it. This information may have to be completely rewritten. You might even need to start from scratch.”

I say: In over fifteen years of doing conversions spanning numerous industries, I’ve never met a client that valued the structure of their documents more highly than the content. It’s usually possible to get them to make concessions where you can demonstrate that the data is not consistently organized, but telling them to rewrite it to fit with the structure that you’ve adopted is simply unrealistic.

Documentation problems are hard. Despite hype to the contrary, they don’t just dry up and blow away when they see DITA coming.