ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) standards are designed, tested, and revised over years by working groups comprised of mostly volunteers who follow strict guidelines and protocols. Information development and content management standards, like DITA and LwDITA, can be good examples of that description, as the process behind their releases can be complicated, and the consensus-driven nature of standards development takes time. Michael Priestley introduced an idea to liberate the DITA standard from its longstanding dependence on the Extensible Markup Language (XML). In DITA, each content component corresponds to an element in XML. The combination of XML, Hypertext Markup Language 5, and Markdown in the initial LwDITA authoring formats enhances the diversity of authors in a DITA-like environment, but it also represents challenges for compatibility and equivalency of models and structures.
