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by pivic 560 days ago
I'm a technical writer. Diátaxis is similar to DITA: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/base/infor...

On the other hand, systems like these might miss out on what users actually need. Diátaxis might work for a long time if technical documentation is only used in a documentation platform. However, if the same information could and should be used in more than one place—for example, in a UI, in a documentation portal, and in a mobile app—there might be need to break up information into smaller pieces in order to assemble them in different ways. This is known as 'content reuse', the practice of using the same content in multiple places. One approach on how to create and edit information for content reuse is described in the 'every page is page one' concept: https://everypageispageone.com/the-book/

If there's resources and time, I always recommend to do UX research at the very start of a project so that one doesn't later feel choked by a severely restricted information model. Nielsen/Norman have done a lot of research in this area and have interesting propositions on how to resolve issues around all of this, for example: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-foraging/#toc-w...

3 comments

>Diátaxis is similar to DITA

I don't see it. DITA differentiates between topic types such as task, reference, concept, etc., but a tutorial or a solution guide will be a combination of those topic types. Here I believe the focus is on deliverables that are larger than the individual topic.

Got an opinion on LwDITA ? Or are you deep enough into DITA that the complexity is not an issue ?

FWIW if you break up your content into reusable chunks and mark it up (with DITA or Docbook semantics, say), it should be a lot more amenable to being "understood" by a LLM... but I have not seen any data on this.

The trouble with DITA is that it is very often accompanied by its own very opinionated toolchain, although of course it's not mandatory. There are better ways to write docs nowadays than wrestle with XSL/FO and its brethren.