ABSTRACT
The existing tool support for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is strong for its main target audience of technical communicators. Nevertheless, the Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) subcommittee expects that the expanded audience of LwDITA will attract a new wave of developers who were not interested in DITA eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Human processes like thinking and abstraction should take place before any automation or machine processing, and authors should be at the center of a LwDITA-based publishing workflow, taking precedence over any software tools. The MDITA topic type, which does not depend on tags written in English, makes LwDITA even more accessible to a variety of authors from diverse professional communities and cultural identities. With LwDITA, XML, is just one of the available agents, and content components for simple expressions of machine-ready metadata and multimedia elements that were not included in previous versions of the DITA standard are available out of the box.
