Have you ever wondered why the toilet paper you use always seems to have the right level of absorbancy? Have you ever scratched your head in disbelief at the softness that makes for the perfect toilet experience? Believe it or not, there's an actual ISO standard that sets the guidelines for its tensile and wet strength, ensuring your toilet paper meets certain quality benchmarks for those, um, critical moments.
Behind every great man is a great standard
Standards aren’t just for toilet paper. Nearly all products and services you use daily - from the shape of electrical outlets to the mysterious ingredients on food packaging - follow some kind of standard. There is even a standard on how to write standards, which, admittedly, might be a little overkill, but hey, we’re not judging!
Here at Flow, we embrace the power of standards by using the DITA standard to organize our documentation. If you want to master it too, you can join our expert-led DITA content writing workshop - because when it comes to standards, we're not joking around.
For more info about our workshop, please refer to the end of this article.
Just ask my grannies
So, what’s DITA, you ask? It’s a standard for content frameworks. It’ll give your unstructured Word docs, Adobe FrameMaker files, or InDesign masterpieces a makeover - into a sleek, XML-based system that even your grandma could navigate.
When it comes to standards, we're not joking around.
When you convert to DITA, you don’t just get topics and maps; you get a content structure that’s the dream of every organized soul out there. Thanks to DITA’s reuse techniques (conref, conkeyref, keyref, and ditaval filtering -try saying that five times fast), your content is as reusable as your grandpa’s classic but oh-so-outdated jokes.
Or take it from my mom
At its core, DITA is built with XML elements that come together in a neat structure of topics, maps, and bookmaps, divided into information types like tasks, concepts, and references. You can think of DITA as the content world’s way of quoting your mom’s ‘Put everything back where it belongs!’—just with more XML and less nagging.
Where do I sign up?
Do you love the idea of more XML and less nagging? Did we convince you to boost your team’s content engineering and DITA XML skills? Then we have good news for you! In our Writing DITA Content Workshop, we help your team dive deeper into creating and managing content using DITA, with hands-on practice and expert guidance. If you wish to participate in one of our workshops, feel free to email us at info@flowtime.be, and we'll gladly provide you with details on upcoming sessions.
See you there!