---
title: "DITA: Why DITA, metadata, working in code and author views, and relationship tables"
date: 2014-04-25
description: "My DITA journey   1.0 My DITA journey begins   1.1 DITA: Folder hierarchy, conref, mapref, and..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2014/04/25/why-use-dita-relationship-tables-working-in-code-and-author-views/
---
# DITA: Why DITA, metadata, working in code and author views, and relationship tables
## Why DITA

A few people have asked me why I started to use DITA. One friend commented that he'd used it a number of years ago and found it both frustrating and restrictive. Others have made similar remarks.

Admittedly, my interest in DITA is more of a curiosity than a true need. Many help authoring tools (HATs) do much of what DITA does. In fact, DITA's inability to produce context-sensitive help is a shortcoming that puts it at a disadvantage to HATs. (See comments for all the people who corrected me on DITA's ability to produce CSH.)

But I have other reasons for using DITA. As I mentioned previously, I am currently publishing on a Drupal web-based platform. It's not one I really recommend for help material. But it has a couple of unique advantages that make it indispensable in my situation. With Drupal, you can restrict access to authenticated users, and you can hook into Drupal's events to trigger other calls.

For example, when someone responds to a forum post, you can hook into the event and make a callback to another service. We integrated our company's gamification features here, so users who respond to posts get points, badges, and rewards, etc. In short, Drupal allows us to provide an example of a gamified community model. When you work for a gamification company, showcasing gamification in any way you can is important.

The problem with many help authoring tools is that their online output can be viewed only within their prepackaged skins. With DITA, you can map the files in a way that allows another system to consume them, such as by embedding metadata in the files (more on metadata in a minute). Building this kind of import mechanism isn't cheap, and it requires programmer skills that I lack. But hopefully that might be something we do in the future.

The other appeal with DITA is the ability to structure content in a universal technical publication format that can be read and parsed by nearly any DITA-aware system. Once I have all my content in DITA, it would be easy to switch systems entirely. An intelligent CMS that can read and process DITA tags can slurp up the content and process it efficiently.