Don Day — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:47:45 GMT

At IBM, we have been using an internally developed wiki that supports native authoring of specs and docs using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) topics at its core. With XML’s separation of presentation from content, and with DITA’s unique separation of navigation from content (via ditamaps), teams using this wiki have been able to bring both programmers and editors/writers together on projects as diverse as whitepapers, API design and reference documentation, and support and tutorial materials. The contributors are largely subject matter experts who are not writers by career training. We have yet to host an instance of UI collaboration. But the reference topic type in DITA should provide a good base for defining repeatable topics for UI specification elements.

That was one thing I actually missed in your excellent article—what ARE the standard elements of an accepted UI specification that should be modelled in a wiki template? Have you considered how wiki writers might make use of XML standards such as UIML (OASIS) as part of the UI specification task? These are certainly some open issues still for IBM’s DITA Wiki that I would like to understand better!

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Don Day