The history of DITA is the history of its many powerful characteristics - modularity, structured writing, information typing, object-oriented, inheritance, specialization, simplified XML, single-source, topic-based, conditional processing, component publishing, task-orientation, content reuse, multi-channel, localization-friendly, usability, consistency, minimalist.

If you don't understand all 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 now incorporates them.

• Before 1960
• The 1960's and '70's - Programmed Learning, STOP, Information Mapping, Advance Organizers
• The 1980's - IBM Task Orientation and Online Help
• The 1990's - IBM Minimalism and User-Centered Design
• The 2000's - IBM DITA
• OASIS DITA
  • DITA 1.0 - Task, Concept, Reference, Specialization
  • DITA 1.1 - Bookmap
  • DITA 1.2 - eLearning

The great historian of technical commnications, R. John Brockmann, has researched efforts to document products going back centuries. He finds that some of today's hottest new ideas were present in the work of those creating, documenting, and selling the technology of manufacturing just after the revolutionary war.

No doubt today's computers, with their spectacular graphical interfaces, allow us to present visual images to support the mere words of standard tech docs. Indeed, we can now produce animated visuals, even 3-D models to illustrate complex machinery. But this is not the work of the everyday tech writer. Flash animations demand skills more like those found in a game design team than a lone tech writer and wordsmith.

Brockmann found two-dimensional images were a key part of 18th century technical documents. And modern ideas like modularity were there in the form of documents, which were as often a set of cards as a book. He also found that early work was very user-centered and task oriented, and that it took advantage of knowledge already available to the user.

It seems that much of the change in today's technical documentation is the direct influence of the computer, and for some obvious reasons:

• Theorists of computer documentation thought they were in a new field and simply reinvented practices long in use for explaining ordinary machines.
• Software documentation, including online help, seems to be the paradigm for today's tech writers..
• Since desktop publishing appeared, we rely heavily on the computer to assist us in the preparation of our documentation.

At Harvard in the 1960's, computers were enlisted to become "teaching machines" by the behaviorist B.F.Skinner. His ideas of "programmed learning" still have influences in today's eLearning models. His work required knowledge to be broken down into chunks.

A History of Technical Communications in the U.S., by R. John Brockmann.

History of Outlining (and STOP).

Quick Reader Comprehension (1961).

Hughes STOP - Sequential Thematic Organization of Publications (1960+).

Mapping Hypertext, Robert Horn, Lexington Institute (1989).

The Nurnberg Funnel, John Carroll, MIT Press(1990).

IBM Improving usability of publications (1981). Task-orientation HTML version

Managing Your Documentation Projects, by JoAnn Hackos (Wiley, 1994).

Robert Horn, Visual Language (1998).

Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel, John Carroll, MIT Press(1998).

Two approaches to modularity (1999). Robert Horn compares structured writing to Hughes STOP.

Review of the Nurnberg Funnel(1999) Robert Horn compares structured writing to Minimalism.

Cisco/Clark Reusable Learning Objects.

Robert Horn Powerpoint on Visual Language.(2003).

Developing Quality Technological Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors (2nd Edition) , by Gretchen Hargis, Michelle Carey, Ann Kilty Hernandez, Polly Hughes, Deirdre Longo, Shannon Rouiller, Elizabeth Wilde (IBM Press, Information Management Series, 2004).

Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People, by JoAnn Hackos (Wiley, 2006).