The DITA sandbox

At the moment this site is made up of (non-work-related) DITA things I'm playing around with, experimenting with, accumulating, etc.

The real focus of that playing is the Music of DITA, which uses my DITA Music Specialization to display a list of everything on my iPod. That list is, stored as a series of ditamap documents, with information about artists, albums, and playlists stored as DITA topics. Note that it may take a few seconds to load, because initially it is formatting a fairly large XML file; to view the page, you will need a relatively modern browser that can process XSLT.

Any of the actual code development related to the music specialization, and any other projects I'll be playing with, is stored over at the DITA Open Toolkit project page at SourceForge. The music specialization itself can be found on the download page for that project.

A bit about myself and my work: my name is Robert D. Anderson, and I work at at IBM on XML and SGML authoring tools (primarily for DITA). I'm the lead architect of the DITA Open Toolkit, and co-editor of the DITA 1.1 and 1.2 Specifications at OASIS. I have a linkedin profile here, although at present I do not use it very often. If you'd like to contact me for any reason, that's probably the best route, other than googling for an email address that isn't listed here...

I've written or been involved with a series of articles on DITA:

• Migrating HTML to DITA (Part 1 and Part 2)
• Publishing Global Information with DITA; note that this page is just a summary, click below my name to see the rest of the article
• Subject classification with DITA and SKOS
• Implementing a DITA plublishing solution without abandoning your current publishing system investments
• "DITA and the localization process", in the October/November 2006 issue of Multilingual magazine

In addition, I've presented or will be presenting on DITA and the DITA Open Toolkit at these venues:

• May 4, 2010: The STC Annual Conference in Dallas, TX (http://conference.stc.org/). Presenting "<nearly/> Hands Free DITA". As part of the presentation, I used the following resources:
  • Metadita skin for WinAnt Echidna: metadita_skin.zip. Unzip and read metadita_skin_README.txt for details.
  • Sample Ant build for branding output: metadita_brand.zip. Unzip directly to your DITA-OT install directory and read metadita/README.txt for details.
• February 24, 2010: Presentation to Boston and RTP DITA User Groups on DITA 1.2
• October 27, 2009: Lavacon in New Orleans (http://www.lavacon.org/)
• May 3-6, 2009: DITA 1.2 presentation to the STC Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA
• November 6-8, 2008: The 2008 Lavacon Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii
• August, 2008: Remote presentation for RTP and Austin DITA User Groups
• November, 2007: Silicon Valley DITA Interest group (recording of the webcast on Extending the DITA-OT is available here: http://www.ditausers.org/tutorials/open_toolkit/anderson/)
• October 28-30, 2007: The 2007 Lavacon Conference in New Orleans, LA
• October 4-6, 2007: DITA 2007 in Raleigh, NC (http://www.brightpathsolutions.com/pages/conf/2007dita/index.html).
  Updated presentation materials for DITA 2007 can be found here.
• May 13-16, 2007: The STC Conference in Minneapolis, MN
• March 23-25, 2006: DITA 2006 in Raleigh, NC