A little while back we covered the advantages and benefits of structured content. However, attending Adobe DITAWORLD (a valuable, annual tech event on DITA structured content) really highlighted the shortcomings of DITA, structured content, and CCMS (Component Content Management Systems).

We quickly realized that as a global digital agency, it was our responsibility to give you the full picture – which includes the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly. As a result, this blog will dive into the obstacles structured content can sometimes present, and the possible ways around them.

However, before we jump straight into the challenges, let’s quickly recap the Adobe Ditaworld conference!

What is DITA?

DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture and is an open-standard specifically designed for publishing technical documentation.

Evolution of DITA Localization, for instance, was a great presentation because it explained the importance of context for translation and the way it can be achieved through preview features.

Is it safe to mention DITA in Polite Society? is an interesting session that covered the latest concepts and discussions around DITA and CCMS.

As usual, there were plenty of big names in the industry, as well as niche players bringing unique perspectives. Some of the recurring structured content themes we saw in the sessions were:

• Integrations with Azure
• Why structured content is important and how to convince your team
• Recurring challenges: migrations, the volume of content demands structure, buy-in
• PDF generation using DITA-OT
• What types of industries use DITA structured content?
• DITA localization, translation (e.g. XTM Cloud)
• Growth in demand for structured content, which seems to be a direct, proportional result of exponential increase in data
• Thinking about structured content, traditionally thought of as “offline” content, in a web context (i.e, dynamic delivery, rendering in web portal, etc.)
• Omni-channel publishing
• Taxonomy, metadata, semantics, intelligent content, etc.

How Does Structured Content Work

One of the clear benefits of DITA is content reuse. When dealing with a situation where 70%+ of content is shared between various documents, languages, regions, etc., it’s crucial to leverage DITA’s fundamental reuse capabilities.

But despite the numerous benefits of structured content and DITA, there are some outstanding technical challenges surrounding structured content and CCMSs, as well as the underlying DITA standard itself.

While the focus has typically been on reuse, localization, smart tagging, etc., customers are demanding many common-sense features that are often simply not there.

Let’s look at some examples from both Adobe AEM with XML Documentation, as well as RWS Tridion Docs.

What Are the Challenges of Structured Content

A Lack of Developer Resources

One invaluable resource for developers is a demo environment, that can be used to test new features, demo custom solutions, for training, etc. While RWS provides this in the form of their One Demo instance, other CMS vendors often do not provide this kind of useful resource.

The lack of developer resources can create a negative impact because it adds unnecessary blockers. For instance, it makes it extremely difficult for teams to get up and running, quickly and easily with a sample installation. Crucial steps like learning the system/new features, developing new features, and testing features take longer, which affects timelines and resources.

Our suggestion for this particular challenge:

Consider choosing a CCMS that provides ample developer resources.

Product Documentation Obstacles

Adobe has a page on product documentation that contains a load of information – except for the actual product documentation, which is lacking and/or difficult to track down.

Good product documentation that is easily findable and accessible is crucial for understanding any software product. This is something that RWS has made easily accessible for the latest iteration of their Tridion Docs product. In fact, RWS has made publicly available product documentation very easy and intuitive to access – making looking up features and guides super easy.

Our suggestion for this particular challenge:

Speak to CMS vendor representatives and ensure easy access to all required documentation.

The Challenge of Publishing and Republishing

Why can’t individual topics be republished, without requiring an entire document to be republished?

If a document contains 1000 topics and only 10 topics are updated, does it make sense to force the user to republish all topics? In the presentation The Single-Source of Truth for Dual-Channel Publishing, the article publishing engine allows individual topic publishing for incremental changes.

Basically, if you have a document with hundreds of topics and only a few topics have been updated, you shouldn’t need to republish all topics in the document – only the ones that have changed. Unfortunately, this is a very common issue across many CMS’s.

In practice, this type of targeted republishing of individual topics is not something that RWS seems to promote. While there are some features and customizations to help make this possible, it can become complicated when combined with dynamic delivery.

Our suggestion for this particular challenge:

Review documentation and thoroughly compare it against your requirements, to ensure you have confidence your team will be able to implement any specific or custom publishing process necessary.

Headless CMS Blockers

Currently, many implementations are relegated to using some sub-optimal mixture of headless and rendered content. For instance, content delivery may provide an API for consuming published content. But this content is typically represented as JSON

Publishing raw DITA XML in a pure headless setup could be faster and simpler by avoiding the need for DITA-OT transformations. This is something that is either discouraged, difficult, and/or uncommon, in general. Or maybe the world of structured content is just not ready to embrace this sort of thing yet.

Our suggestion for this particular challenge:

Look ahead to what channels your content will be published to, now and in the future. Omnichannel content delivery demands a headless approach. Be sure your choice of CCMS can handle these scenarios.

Inaccurate Previewing

Previewing structured content in a web context remains a challenge in many implementations. The tools for viewing and editing DITA content often simply do not provide a preview environment that accurately presents content as it would appear when published.

There are various ways to view, edit and preview structured content before it is published (e.g. viewing the content in web client, preview tools, oXygen XML Author, etc.). However, and especially when working with Headless CMS, none of these tools are accurate representations of how the content will appear to the end-user.

For example, with RWS Tridion, the user can do all sorts of things with alt-texts that are not valid once converted to HTML. Meaning, on the CMS side everything works fine. But then once published, the content either does not display properly or not at all.

However, with new browser editing tools, such as RWS’s Draft Space, it becomes somewhat ambiguous who is responsible for enforcing rules – should these be handled directly in the CMS? Or as an oXygen customization, for instance?

RWS Tridion Sites (i.e. not structured content) has a great feature to deal with this called Experience Manager, or XPM. It essentially provides a WYSIWYG editor to the content team so they can see exactly what any piece of content will look like once published to their website. Unfortunately, structured content CMSs typically don’t have equivalent features.

Our suggestion for this particular challenge:

Consider implementing a simple preview environment, even a new publishing target, if necessary. You could consider replicating the front-end presentation on the CMS side. Ultimately, this will always present challenges, especially if the content is being transformed and/or delivered, and not purely headless.

DITA

Is it going to be around in the future? Many still consider it to be an outdated standard. It has been a tremendous challenge for the pro-DITA camp to break this stigma and promote wider adoption, despite positive indicators of growth in demand for structured content management.

You learn more about this in my earlier blog on structured content.

Shortcomings of the DITA Open Toolkit include missing elements and attributes when rendering DITA content as HTML

Our suggestion for this particular challenge:

Weigh the pros and cons of embracing an older and slowly evolving standard like DITA, versus the alternatives. There are correct answers here that will apply to everyone.

The Future of Structured Content Management

Many of these shortcomings have workarounds or customizations to supplement customer needs, but it would be more ideal to see all of these introduced as mainstream features of the next generations of CCMSs.

Customers have successfully implemented basic use cases like PDF publishing, but are reluctant to take on more ambitious projects, such as dynamic delivery of headless DITA-based content for consumption by multiple web channels via GraphQL APIs with full integration with Elasticsearch.

This is due to:

• Overhead
• Learning curve
• Investment
• Not seeing the hidden value
• Overlooking the potential

Our team at Content Bloom can help you see the benefits, we have cutting-edge experience in implementing modern, headless, dynamic, and personalized structured content and digital experiences for several Fortune 500 companies. You won’t need to worry about overlooked potential or missing out on hidden benefits.

Learn more about our work with Structured content.