DITA XML can shrink the volume a technical writer creates, translates, and maintains: and a firewall vendor once got its documentation praised by the press because of it. But the productivity comes with a complexity bill. Here’s where structured authoring earns its keep, and where it’s overkill.
A growing engine-oil catalog — brands, viscosities, prices — becomes a maintenance nightmare as a Markdown table and a verbose tangle as DITA XML. One YAML file holds each fact once and generates every table, doc page, and app view from it.
