Presented by Alan Houser at Documentation and Training West, May 6-9, 2008 DITA provides an end-to-end architecture for authoring, managing, and publishing topic-oriented technical information. DITA may appear to be an ideal solution for authoring and maintaining online help systems. However, the DITA specification does not directly accommodate many of the customary and expected features provided by conventional help authoring tools. Learn how you can use DITA today to deliver online help, and learn what the DITA Technical Committee is doing to make DITA more directly usable for online help in the future. Attendees will learn the following: * How features of the DITA architecture map to the structure of conventional online help systems * Why DITA can provide an ideal solution for authoring, maintaining, and delivering online help * Current issues and limitations when using DITA for online help * Common features of help authoring tools and how they map to (or don’t map to) DITA * Approaches for maintaining and delivering DITA-based context-sensitive help

12. Example: HTML Help

13. Example: Customized Help Engine

14. Example: Customized (AIR-based) Help Viewer

15. Example: Customized (AIR-based) Help Viewer

16. Example: MS Windows Vista Help