"While fields and templates have come to dominate web publishing tools,
the XML world has spent nearly 15 years developing a parallel approach.
Rather than chunking content into fields and re-assembling it later, the
XML community embraces fluid, markup-based documents. To capture
meaningful structure and avoid HTML’s browser-specific presentation
pitfalls, they define purpose-specific collections of markup tags for
different projects and applications. It’s a versatile approach that has
crossed paths with the web publishing world: the XHTML standard is just
HTML, defined as an XML schema.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture standard—better known as
DITA—is a mature example of this approach. Developed by IBM and
announced in 2001, DITA was shaped by the technical documentation
community."
Of course, it's not just a "let's use DITA" article:
"The good news is we don’t have to convert all our projects to XML to
learn from those communities’ accumulated wisdom. While the toolchains
that have been built around those approaches are a tough fit for today’s
mature web development tools and workflows, we can use their principles
in our projects."
