ABSTRACT
The future of technical communication has been associated in industry and academia with the Extensible Markup Language (XML), which can structure information and enable features of intelligent content. Intelligent content is discoverable, reconfigurable, and adaptable, and a common grammar of XML used to structure it is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This chapter provides descriptions, historical context, and examples of XML and DITA for technical communication and content development. While DITA is a popular open standard for structuring content, some practitioners complain about its dependence on complex XML tags. For some academics, DITA seems too complicated and alien to the work of humanities-based writing and communication programs. Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) is a proposed approach for simplifying DITA structures while keeping most of its benefits for intelligent content. LwDITA is based on XML, but it also includes authoring formats based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Markdown. LwDITA syntax is computer code for human authors, and it is based on principles of computational thinking, which emphasize mental abstraction before metal automation processes.
