History of DITA The history of DITA is the history of its many
powerful characteristics - modularity, structured writing,
information typing, separation of content from presentation,
single-sourcing, minimalism, topic-based, task-orientation,
content reuse, conditional processing, localization-friendly,
multi-channel, component publishing, usability, consistency,
object-orientation, inheritance, specialization, simplified XML.
If you don't understand all these DITA characteristics, you may
not have analyzed the DITA Business Case properly - for your
organization, or for yourself if you are a professional writer.
You don't have to know how to do all these things to use DITA,
but if there is no one in your organization who knows why you
should use them, you may have a problem. If you have already
been doing some of these things, you will want to know how DITA
incorporates them. - Before 1960 - The 1960's and '70's -
Programmed Learning, STOP, QRC, Advance Organizers, Information
Mapping - The 1980's - SGML, IBM