That’s the view of Gordon McLean, who writes at length about single sourcing with DITA in this blog post.

Gordon makes several good points in his post. It’s not as if he’s maliciously sniping from the sidelines, either. He did it right: a lot of research and analysis. He got his hands dirty and, in his own way, lived with DITA for a while.

One thing is clear: DITA isn’t a magic bullet for single sourcing documentation. It still has several weaknesses; Gordon pointed some of them out in his post. Another is that it’s difficult to get good PDF or online help from DITA without extensively customizing XSL stylesheets or passing DITA source files through tools like FrameMaker, Flare, or WebWorks.

I’ve always seen DITA as being best suited for an organization that:

• Has a large documentation set with extensive content re-use across that set
• Is localizing such a document set into multiple languages
• Deals with complex documents that have multiple conditionals and multiple outputs or output formats

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against DITA. It’s a powerful tool, and definitely has its place. As do DocBook, FrameMaker, AuthorIT, and every other single-sourcing tool or approach out there. Each has its merits, and each has its drawbacks. But there is no ultimate solution to the problem of effective single sourcing. What’s right for one organization definitely can’t be effectively shoehorned into the needs of another.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Multisourcing: an alternative to single sourcing?
2. Sphinx: single sourcing, Open Source
3. A different perspective on single sourcing